Finnegans Wake is a novel written by James Joyce and published in 1939. Considered a great monument of Irish literature, it is also considered a difficult text to understand, initially mixing several languages such as English and Irish…
James Joyce’s tale of Irish history blends mythology, fairy tale and reality, from the origins of civilizations to their decadence and fall.
James Joyce sees this book as a perpetual “cycle”, recounting the birth of civilizations on the premise that every civilization is born from chaos, passes through theocratic, aristocratic and then democratic phases, before falling back into chaos and nothingness… and so on.
Finnegans Wake took 17 years to write: a colossal project!
Renowned for the quality of its writing and the subtlety of its parables, Finnegans Wake is by no means an easy read… Hardly accessible to the non-literary, it is nevertheless considered by many as an indigestible paving stone…
Yet Finnegans Wake is the bearer of a formidable theory on the “cyclical” mechanism of History: Joyce is trying to offer his readers a metaphysical and philosophical vision of History, in the image of the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, known as the precursor of historian philosophy.
In this way, Joyce shows that a society goes through a succession of phases before reaching its own destruction… Here is an overview of these phases:
Each chapter deals with its own phase, plunging the reader into a never-ending whirlwind… The literary quality is grandiose, but unfortunately rather inaccessible to the uninformed public…
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