In 1939, the famous Irish novelist Joyce completed and published his last masterpiece, "For Finnegans Wake", two years later he died in Zurich, Switzerland. In this novel, Joyce wrote: "I have mixed feelings, a little trouble, who can understand me? Who is there in the dark night for thousands of years?" More than half a century has passed, who is still there today What about reading and understanding Joyce's painstaking work? Who is Joyce keeping a watch for? for myself? for his time? for modernism? Or is it for the traditional Western concept of fiction? Who can answer the many riddles that Joyce devised? The 970,000-word "Joyce Biography" written by Richard Ehrman, a well-known contemporary American scholar and Joyce research expert, may provide us with some useful enlightenment and answers.
Joyce's "For Finnegans Wake" was conceived in the 1920s and took 17 years to write. This work greatly surpasses the already rather difficult Ulysses in terms of obscurity and mystery. Joyce pushed the stream of consciousness technique and the experiment of manipulating language to the extreme, so that this work is still a "book from heaven" that researchers have different opinions and difficult to understand. Even Joyce's friends, almost all they see in the book are puns. First they don't understand, then they're unhappy, and finally they're angry, sad, or sarcastic. On November 15, 1926, Pound wrote to Joyce after reading selected sections from the magazine: "I will try again, but so far I have no clue. No clue yet. , What is the use of beating around the bush, unless it is unknowable, or the secret recipe of willow disease, it must be understood." The writer Wells believes that this book is "some huge mystery". The average reader won't have fun with it, and won't get "something fresh and enlightening" from it. He asked: "What the hell is this Joyce that demands so many hours of my waking hours out of the thousands of hours I'm still alive to ponder him, to figure out his whimsical ideas and expressions. ?" Joyce's younger brother, Stanislaus, said in a letter to his brother that the book was "indescribably tiresome . Knowing you, I will never see this thing for more than a paragraph." Joyce joked that the book would keep critics busy for at least 300 years. Joyce was always so confident that his genius was so extraordinary that any of his whims made sense. Hopefully people will read his books as a lifelong career. The novel is also considered by some scholars as "a very funny book". In short, Joyce completely deviates from the norms and standards of traditional literary creation, and erects an impenetrable barrier between the author and the reader. Because of this, this novel has become a masterpiece with a very high status and controversy in the Western literary world, but few people care about it.
"For Finnegans Wake" writes about the overnight sleepless nights of a family of five hoteliers in the suburbs of Dublin, most of which are the dreams and hallucinations of the hero hotel owner, Eawick. Joyce had an early interest in dreams, although he was not interested in Freud. The title of the novel comes from an Irish ballad "Finnegan's Wake". According to legend, Finnegan was a bricklayer and usually greedy for a good glass of wine. One day he fell off a ladder because he was very drunk. Mistaking him for his death, his companions, in accordance with Irish custom, held a wake for him and put some fine wine beside him. Finnegan woke up when he smelled the wine. In English, "wake up" and "wake up" are the same word (wake). This makes the title of the novel complex and rich (fin-again-wakes). Fin is "the end", but again is "reappearance". "Finnegan never really woke up because Ervik failed to establish a continuous passage between the dream world and the waking world." Also, the title commemorates Finn's Hotel. , Nora had a private life with Joyce while working here. Nora was Joyce's life partner and they married in 1931 after living together for 27 years. They had a son and a daughter.
If "Ulysses" is a book about the day, then "The Wake" is a book about the dark. The book promotes the idea that history repeats itself in cycles, and that civilizations develop and decline in cycles. The author's thought was influenced by the historical cycle theory of the Italian philosopher Vico in the early 18th century. "The road of Vico is twists and turns, going round and round. We are still indifferent to this cycle, and we are not shocked by the cyclers. We have peace of mind, and you don't have to worry." The
novel's language structure also fully reflects this ideological feature. . The cycle of language means the cycle of history. The novel begins with a lowercase letter from the middle of a sentence: the
river rushes through the paradise of Eve and Adam, from the curved coast to the twisty bay, and through a wide vico recirculation takes us back to House Castle and Suburbs of Dublin.
(riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.)
Here, "riverrun" is a new word coined by Joyce, in any Can't find it in the dictionary. Although the meaning of the word is not difficult to guess, it is difficult to figure out its part of speech. The end of the novel is the first half of the first sentence at the beginning of the novel, which means that the novel goes back to the beginning from the end, forming a veritable cycle. This is the so-called "doublends joined":
this distant, A way alone a last alove a long the (A way alone a last alove a long the)
That is to say, the novel has no beginning and no end, and readers can start from anywhere in the novel and easily enter this cycle mode. Talking about the idea of the novel, Joyce said he was making a wheel, but the wheel was square. This means that the novel is divided into four parts, but the four parts constitute a circular whole. The four parts of the novel are: the fall of mankind, struggle, humanity, and regeneration. There are 17 chapters in the novel. As for the novel's ending, Joyce said: "In Ulysses, I wanted to describe a woman muttering to herself before falling asleep, and I needed to find the most effortless word to end. I found 'really' '(yes), the word has no sound at all, but expresses acceptance, commitment, relaxation, termination of all resistance. In Work in Progress. I want to go a step further. This time I found the most weightless, most weightless language in English. The unemphasized, weakest word, a word that does not become its word, a word that comes out through the teeth with almost no sound, a little bit of air, a thing that does not become a thing, that is the article the."
Joyce believes that his novel has no different layers of meaning to unearth. "It's meant to make you laugh." "I'm just an Irish harlequin, a cosmic joker." Joyce He doesn’t really want to teach, he doesn’t have any extravagant expectations, he just wants to give people a little entertainment.” He is paying more and more attention to the role of language, which he believes is mainly a means of expression formed through division and bonding. In order to express the sleeping mind, he needed a multilingual language of his own making. In order to describe the long dark night, he needed to write for his ears, which, of course, had something to do with his increasingly weak eyesight. In his view, history is also akin to puns, and historical events are akin to burlesque, with slight variations and repetitions. In short, Joyce made a well-meaning joke in the face of a bad world.
As a postmodern novel, Joyce is particularly obsessed with exploring and experimenting with various new functions of language, "and tries to create an independent 'reflexive text' through the 'autonomy of language' (the autonomy of language) -reflexive text). As the author is trying to construct a completely self-sufficient language system to replace the 'referentiality' and 'aboutness' that literary works should have, he is reluctant to go out of his own text, and It shows readers an ontologically independent, basically closed fictional world and a maze that people can never get out of.” In this way, the novel has nothing to do with the outside world, it is only about itself and language. “Finnegans Wake is all about Finnegans Wake. That is, the book is not only about everything, but about how to record and interpret it all. This recording, both writing and reading, constitutes This book, or at least most of it.” In Beckett’s words, “The Finnegans Wake is not about something, it is something”. In this sense, the novel does possess the most important characteristic of postmodern novels, and it seems to be the end of the modernist novels that once flourished.
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