104
PARTISAN REVIEW
episode of Part II) and examples of the hyperbole of the second
(the sixth episode of Part I) we can conclude that the style of
Finnegans Wake
is compounded of the characteristic modes of
expression of all three epochs of history.
The
form
of the work is, therefore, contained in each of its
parts. "In fact, under the closed eyes of the inspectors the traits
featuring the
chiaroscuro
coalesce," we are told on page 107,
"their contrarieties eliminated, in one stable somebody .•." The
problem of interpretation is the detection and labelling of these
traits-symbols, images, motifs-and the reordering of them
according to some logic of the mind. And this is a problem that is
rendered almost hopelessly difficult by the very nature of the
narrative method that Joyce has adopted.
It is clear that the center of everything is the dreamer, H. C.
Earwicker; but while this citizen of Dublin is an individual char–
acter, highly particularized in many respects, he is also an arche–
type of the race. This is to say that his dream is conducted simul–
taneously on the two planes of the personal and the universal; and
one is by no means always able to determine the exact nature of
their "coalescence". This may be illustrated by the treatment of
the Fall-motif, which occupies the first episode. The Fall is ren–
dered from every one of its possible aspects. There is first of all
the fall of the earth from the original Chaos: the Humpty-Dumpty
ballad harks back to the most ancient cosmological myths, like that
of the Orphic conception of the universe as an egg upon.the waters,
whose breaking was responsible for the earth and other planets.
Primitive man fell from the state of animal unconsciousness when
he lifted his eyes in terror to the sky and inquired the source of
the thunder-bolt:
Finnegans Wake
may be said properly to begin
with the polylingual word for thunder on Page
1.
Adam fell from
the state of innocence and grace when he ate of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil; and Phoenix Park takes on much of
the vegetation of the Garden of Eden throughout the episode. Then
there are the innumerable falls of heroes and men, which would
include those of Agamemnon and of Finnegan from his ladder. All
these are to be identified with Earwicker's own fall from virtue
through some unworthy act in the Phoenix Park one spring morn–
ing. But the exact nature of his crime is made known to us only
