Joyce's Finnegans Wake

Abstract

This eighth in a series continues this ground-breaking word-by-word analysis of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. This volume covers chapter 3.3, a long and difficult chapter in the form of a father’s dream.

Father HCE dreams of a passive son named "Yawn," a version of Shaun. Made passive by sucking up to customers, the father’s primal desires project a passive son potentially subject to father control. And this Yawn is so passive he needs help in releasing his feces. Talk about anal retentive!

The dreamer’s script loads Yawn’s defenseless psyche with aspects of father-troubled sons from the collective past, including Freud's famous client Wolfman, Cain and Oedipus. Father trouble registers as distortions in the son’s sexual relationships.

Father-fearing Wolfman took his controlled son role to a “hole” new level. After witnessing his parents’ sex a tergo [male erect, female on knees, doggy style or “dog ma”] and fearing his father’s angry reaction to his witness and celebratory primal turd, he adopted the ultimate passive beta male attitude: he wanted to be his father’s wife.

Yawn in the role of father-troubled Cain is questioned in the dream by the synoptic gospellers [Matthew, Mark and Luke]. They serve as tools of the father’s desire to control his son, as they controlled the historical presentation of god’s son Jesus. They try to reduce Yawn’s particular take on independence, his Cain-like tendency to pursue his whims, including killing to get all the sisters. Cain’s lack of caring gives us the problems of cities, which are splattered all over this chapter.

Yawn in the role of father-troubled Oedipus makes the same mistake as Jesus in Gesthemane: he treats his foster father as his real father. Oedipus ends up with his mommy as wife as Yawn is hung up on his. The suggestion is made that the dreamer knows at some level that Shaun was fathered by Father Michael with a blackmailed ALP, not by foster father HCE.

Freud’s hypothesis plays out through Yawn’s porous character: "individual gaps in human truth are filled by prehistoric truths." Yawn bears the puncture wounds of the prehistoric father desires for control. Yawn is defenseless because he lacks individuality.

The chapter starts with an anal retentive and dependent son Yawn all alone in the dark, fearful and needing help with an enema. The chapter concludes as the new day dawns and a spontaneous evacuation is made. Gracing these more promising circumstances, the voice of the Holy Ghost [Joyce’s version] as the individuality-enhancing father of Jesus boldly breaks into the dream, silences the OT father voice and brands as fraudulent the presentation of Jesus as a servant and eunuch by the three synoptic gospellers.

The mystical gospeller John bears witness to the presence of the Holy Ghost by unloading a trinity of turds of shame and the old in order to clear his mind for active and mystical participation in the Holy Ghost. He unloads spontaneously, just as Wolfman did his primal turd.

The Quick shed the Dead.

About the Author

This non-academic author, a retired lawyer and lifelong Joyce reader, brings new approaches in an attempt to find the deep meaning of each of Joyce's chapters and the novel as a whole. The intended scope of this effort, the complete Joyce, is unique in an area monopolized by more narrowly-focused academics. "I found that the best way to understand the novels I loved in college was to write about them, so I have since 1995 been communing with them and writing literary analysis books about them as art forms, how they work as art. This series on Finnegans Wake is the challenge I put off until last. Let us hope it finishes before I do."