Ruins and Fragments by Robert Harbison

Author:Robert Harbison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Finding the plot

If there isn’t much of a plot, maybe there’s something like an overarching metaphor that gives the whole thing unity. Joyce’s own version of this is to say that Ulysses treated a single day and that Finnegan takes place in a corresponding night, not the night of 16 June 1904 or any other particular day, because nights aren’t specific or time bound in that way. He also says he wants to put language to sleep and show it reshaped by the unconscious impulses of the dreamer. Seizing on this, some readers have tried to interpret the book as the extended dream of a single sleeper, HCE in bed in his pub at Chapelizod on the outskirts of Dublin.

The idea that this immense, encyclopaedic work could take place in a single consciousness, even Joyce’s, is far-fetched. The book has its eye on a kind of synthesis far beyond the capacity of an individual or set of characters to embody or contain. It isn’t written entirely in the language of sleep or any other single dialect. At times it veers into the groggy consciousness of someone waking up, but elsewhere it strives for grand cultural conspectuses through associational conflations that hide their complexity in order to take the reader by surprise and overcome him all at once as lyric poetry habitually does. Finnegans Wake is more like a 600-page lyric poem than a novel, and more like an enormous historical rhapsody than a single story or even an interlocking set of stories.

It still baffles me that it is as long as it is, but perhaps like The Faerie Queene it insists that you should become lost in it, because the vision really is grand in spite of the micro-scale of the pieces of the mosaic. Not that there is an extensive picture you’re meant to decipher, but that the book’s accumulated reference is finally miraculous.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.