A SHORTER FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce, edited by Anthony Burgess. 256 pages. Viking. $6.
Even the Irish, with their taste for enjoying their troubles, admit that a wake can go on too long for everybody but the corpse. And Finnegans Wake is the longest wake in history. It is also the most conjested wake in history: hundreds of fictional and historical characters dance attendance on poor Finnegan as he is laid out over 628 pages.
These and other things have not helped its readers in the 28 years since James Joyce's labyrinthine masterpiece was published. Its comic genius is buried in a mountainous midden of language that is neither English nor Irish. Nor, for that matter, is it any other European tongue. It is all of them at once—"Eurish," a maze of European tongues, polylingual puns, multiple meanings, parodies, philosophy, public events and private jokes, and a multitude of characters, real and imaginary, in a span of time from Genesis to Judgment Day.
Bravely, Britain's Anthony Burgess, novelist (A Clockwork Orange) and Joyce scholar (Re Joyce), has threaded the labyrinth, determined to demonstrate that Finnegans Wake is more than just a grammarian's funeral. He has reduced the text by about two-thirds, added an introduction that is admirable for clarity, good sense and erudition, and has placed commentaries here and there to help any dog-Latinist through the Joycean style. Even so, the plain reader (if such exists) will soon find himself in waters deeper than the River Liffey.
Vico's Cycle. In brisk, schoolmasterly fashion (both Burgess and Joyce once taught school), Burgess expounds, for those who came in late, the ABCs of Wake. The structure of the book, he explains, follows the four-cycle theory of history devised by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1774), in which human societies progress through the four stages of theocracy, aristocracy, democracy and ricorso (or recurrence). The title of the book is itself a Joycean wordplay. "Finn (fin or finis) -egan" could mean "end again," suggesting the completion of Vico's cycle, while "Wake" suggests rising from sleep, or beginning life again.
Bearing out that notion, the book deals directly with a man who is made to "relive the whole of history in a single night's sleep." He is a pubkeeper named Porter, but his Freudian alias in the dream is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Why Earwicker? Well, Porter's night life is invaded by an incestuous passion for his daughter Isobel (Iseult-Isolde). The inadmissible word "incest" sneaks by as "insect," specifically "earwig." Thus the odd name, says Burgess, is "dreamily appropriate."