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PARTISAN REVIEW
ciated with men just as much as the sword with war. In fact, the
more closely we study these metaphorical devices the more they
break down into the single device of synecdoche. All metaphor
would seem to be an expression of the inveterate human need of
coordinating experience.
Is it possible that Joyce intends not only every word but the
book itself to be an example of synecdoche? Let us look for what
clues we may discover in the title. The identification of Tim Finne·
gan, the Irish hod-carrier, with Finn Mac Cool, the Irish hero, and
the suggestion of a pluralized form of "again" may be related to
the main subject-the resurrection of the hero. "Wake" is one of
those words that have undergone a radical transformation into
their opposites in the course of their usage. Derived from an
Anglo-Saxon root meaning "to be born", it seems to have acquired
by association the meanings "to be awake" and, by further associa·
tion, "to be watchful". From the last of these meanings it came to
be applied to the watch over the dead. The additional sense as the
trail left behind by a ship is of independent origin. Now all five
of these senses are capable of being related to the main structure
of the work:
E.
C. Earwicker, in whose sleeping brain is retraced
the whole wake of history, will rise up again like Finnegan at his
wake and be born again. "Life, he himself said once ... is a wake,
livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our bread-winning lies the cropse
of our seedfather."
But this is merely another striking instance of the use of a
part for the whole. Of what whole might the book itself be con–
sidered a part? Joyce describes the work in a number of passages
in the text-practically the whole of the fifth episode of Part I is
devoted to this purpose-and refers to it by various names and
phrases. It is a "vicociclometer", a "collideoscope", a "proteiform
graph", a "Jeeremyhead sindbook", and a "polyhedron of scrip–
ture". But perhaps the most revealing of these " kennings" is
"Meanderthale". For as the Greek river Meander wound its cir–
cuitous course through so many valleys (German,
Thal)
of the
earth to the sea, the tale will finally have its ending (Latin,
talis)
with Earwicker's dream of Anna Livia (the stream of History)
returning again into the sea of Time. Moreover, like the river
whose substance is the ever changing distillation of the ever un–
changeable elements its substance is the ever changing and
