108
PARTISAN REVIEW
more blurred and evasive. One cannot always distinguish between
the sleeper and the figures of his dream; Earwicker melts into
Shaun and Shaun into Earwicker; their voices become confused
in
the dusk of language.
This is illustrated in the last passage of all-the beautiful
swan-song with which the work ends. The final section is in the
form of a
coda,
which reassembles all the themes that have been
developed, in a great prean of resurrection. Earwicker wakes from
his long Saturday night's sleep and turns toward the morning light
But it is a resurrection in more than this superficial and rather
comic sense: he has traversed the whole time-space world, and this
too has turned out to have a pattern like that of individual human
life-of waking and sleeping, of beginning and ending, of being
young and growing old. The effect of his dream has been to recon·
cile him to his present stage of life, and this may be considered
a new·equilibrium. In the course of the process he is able to realize
also his wife's feelings about the old age that is overtaking them
both; he identifies himself with her to the extent of thinking her
thoughts and going over her memories. And by the time we reach
the threnody beginning "Soft morning, city!" the identification is
so complete that he is speaking in her voice-which has now
become also the voice of Anna Livia, returning to her father the
sea. In other words, Earwicker's resurrection consists in his sense
that he too will soon become part of the record, that he will breathe
the air of the heroes in the common element of history. "Meme–
mormee" is one of the very last of the difficult words in this diffi·
cult book.·
Is it possible that
Finnegans Wake
represents a final stage
in
that long process of transcendence which has characterized Joyce's
work from the beginning? In
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man
Stephen Dedalus passes through what might be called an
initiation rite to emerge as an artist dedicated to the creation of the
"uncreated conscience" of his race. But this was not an adequate
transcendence, in the sense either of primitive religion or of mod·
ern psychoanalysis, in which the individual always carries over
elements of the old self into the new self that is restored to the
world. Stephen had left behind all the old symbols of love and
authority without discovering any new ones to take their place.
