A Schizophrenic Reads Finnegans Wake

By Arthur Manley

“In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality.” 

I was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was nineteen, but tracing back my life I’ve been symptomatic with the condition since about the age of seven. Consequently, schizophrenia has been dominant in my life, shaping all of my thoughts and experiences, so much so that a schizophrenic existence is all that I really know.

I had heard of Finnegans Wake long before I ever read it, and the very concept of it fascinated me, a fascination which intensified when I did in fact finally read it. It struck me as a text that is like minded to me, reflective very well of the chaos that has long existed in my own head, the chaos I’ve learned to adapt to and even, I hope, harness. When I turned to the critical theory surrounding FW, I was unsurprised to find numerous critical pieces talking about FW and schizophrenia. But a lot of these I found to be immensely disappointing. Ignorant as the critics would be about the reality of schizophrenia beyond the symptom lists of diagnostic manuals and the odd reading of a psychiatrist’s report (with one critic even stating this bluntly, saying, “little has so far been made of the idea that the text itself at times displays stereotypical textbook symptoms of psychosis such as aphasia, paralysis or amnesia”), these pieces nonetheless arrogantly claim authoritative knowledge about schizophrenia and apply this ‘knowledge’ to FW. One that particularly disappointed me was even made by a doctor, MD Ronald William Pies, who said,

“In poetry, there is usually a tension between private and public meaning. In schizophrenic writing, there is a drastic skewing toward the private. Further, what appears to be metaphor in schizophrenic writing is often private language. To the extent that this is true, schizophrenic writing becomes less a poem and more a code, or logogriph.”

This is a prime example of the kind of insulting and inaccurate attitude to schizophrenia and the schizophrenic that proliferates in the world of literary criticism, an attitude in which we are reduced to little better than animals, incapable of anything other than vacantly vomiting up the contents of our heads onto a page; incapable of the metaphor and subtlety that ‘real poets’ use, with any metaphors or subtlety we do, in fact, use, presented as some ‘secret code’ without any meaning, not worth bothering with.

I fundamentally object to this, and I object to its application to FW also. I see this dehumanising attitude to the schizophrenic as being endemic to critical comparisons of the text with schizophrenia/psychosis, such as Herr’s talk of ‘schizophrenesis’ (rather than schizophrenia) as an ironic commentary on anti-Irish racism, Zangouei’s claim that Joyce used ‘postmodern techniques’ to approximate schizophrenia, and last but not least Campbell’s Skeleton Key which I will discuss in greater detail later.

FW is, in my opinion, a genuinely schizophrenic text, which is exceedingly rare. This ‘genuine schizophrenia’ is something that I can’t really justify other than by saying I see myself in the text like with a mirror, rather than, as with so many supposedly schizophrenic texts, like a caricature. Thus I think I can offer something of a unique perspective on the text. But this essay is not ‘a schizophrenic reading of Finnegans Wake’, it is ‘a schizophrenic reads Finnegans Wake’ and so I will discuss subjects perhaps not obviously relevant to schizophrenia, but, like every other thought and experience I’ve had since I was seven years old, the whole essay will be coloured by my schizophrenia - and perhaps the reader might argue parts of my reading as completely delusional, as insane, but it is nonetheless my reading.

Methodology and Anti-Methodology

“Ullhodturdenweirmudgaardgringnirurdrmolnirfenrirlukkilokkibaugimandodrrerinsurtkrin-mgernrackinarockar! Thor’s for yo!

The hundredlettered name again, last of a perfect language.”

It is typical in pieces of literary criticism to find quotations from the text in question and use them to make wide points about the text, often presenting these quotations as being emblematic or microcosmic of the text as a whole - and then performing a close reading on these ‘super-quotes’ to attempt poignant, penetrating points about the entire text. I’m not going to do this. I do not believe there are any critical ‘super-quotes’ to be plucked out of FW; there aren’t ‘more significant’ and thus ‘less significant’ sections of the prose. The reasons for this are twofold and paradoxical; they are the factors described by G. K. Chesterton:

"Great poets are obscure for two opposite reasons; now, because they are talking about something too large for anyone to understand and now, again, because they are talking about something too small for anyone to see."

While Chesterton here was talking about poetry in the context of that poetry’s meaning, words as to what they refer to and what they imply, for FW this is true of the very language and form itself, of the book itself. For the former, “talking about something too large”, the language of the text can only be viewed in the context of the whole text. I think FW should be viewed holistically. In any text, taking quotes out of it to analyse is of course taking a part out of a whole, but in FW, drawing quotes from it is like picking a single flower out of a field in the attempt of understanding the Earth.

For the latter, ‘talking about something too small”, quotes drawn from the text are far too massive in their scope: most of the words in FW are formed out of multitudes of other words, often broken down into morphemes and made into elaborate multilingual puns, and sentences are thus made up of numerous other ideas and sources that altogether render each sentence in relation massive. But this ‘pun-theory’ is itself an assumption. Since, as almost everyone agrees, FW is written in non-English, and beyond that non-any-other-language, it is only an assumption that it is in fact made up of these multilingual puns drawn from recognisable human languages. Who's to say that it is not in fact an entirely new language isolate not drawn from any other language? That what looks to be recognisable words, recognisable morphemes aren’t in fact false friends? While this assumption is understandable and probably the right way to go in terms of criticism, I think it important to recognise that this is still an assumption, and thus to try and talk about what certain words/sentences mean and claim certainty is incorrect and potentially dangerously misleading.

Finnegans Wake profoundly rejects the logic of language and the logic of meaning, so that to read it and appreciate it one has to abandon logic and engage with it differently to how one would any other prose (‘novel’ is somewhat problematic when talking of FW), because if one approaches it expecting the normal conventions of language, words and inherent logic (i.e. words necessarily following on from each other, sentences making ‘sense’) one is going to get nowhere with the text and fall into many errors.

The prime example of this attitude towards FW is Joseph Campbell’s and Henry Morton Robinson’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, a supposed ‘synopsis’ of FW designed so that, “the amazing narrative of Joyce’s dream-saga is laid bare”, that will “disclose the majestic logic” of the text (note the commitment to ‘logic’). The authors’ goal is stated bluntly: they wished to bring out the narrative ‘hidden’ in FW. Talking in his foreword to the 1944 edition of The Skeleton Key, Campbell said,

“Provoked by the sheer magnitude of [FW], we felt that if Joyce had spent eighteen years in its composition we might profitably spend a few deciphering it”

Here I am called to reflect with some amusement and bitter irony on Pies’ description of schizophrenic writing as a ‘code’ and his unfavourable comparison of that with ‘poetry’. No, it seems to me that the neurotypical is the one obsessed with codes here, not the schizophrenic, it is the neurotypical who sees literature as a code to crack, to ‘decipher’. 

What is so objectionable about The Skeleton Key is that it is fundamentally an attempt to improve upon a work by destroying it. Campbell even states,

“...from sentence to sentence we had to select and again select… precisely the one or two lines to be fixed and rendered.”

Campbell betrays himself with the word ‘fixed’ - it suggests he sees FW as needing fixing, as being imperfect, and so he sets out to make an improvement. Ultimately all literary criticism is focused on improving the understanding of its subject matter, but The Skeleton Key sets out to do this in a destructive, even iconoclastic way. Lots of neurotypical people are exceedingly interested in schizophrenia and the schizophrenic, we represent mystery and ‘otherness’ to them. The inverse is not true; the schizophrenic is not exceedingly interested in the neurotypical. It is FW’s schizophrenia; its uniqueness; its new language and form; its chaos, that makes it so interesting and so important a work of literature. Why then would one even want to ‘translate’ it? I think it antithetical to the work of literary criticism to make a good text bad, to rip a text to shreds and then sellotape it back together into a digestible, ‘easy-to-read’ version.  The Skeleton Key seeks to distort and reduce FW to a Cliffnotes form so that the lazy reader who doesn’t want to actually engage with the text itself can pretend they’ve read it. It is replacing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with a cartoon. I don’t doubt that Campbell and Robinson employed a lot of skill in constructing it. And I don’t doubt that they believed they were doing the right thing and were very dedicated to their task. But I also don’t doubt that the Taliban were dedicated and believed they were doing the right thing when they destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

We can’t employ The Skeleton Key’s kind of empiricism, their logical approach of sourcing words from different languages when approaching FW. I think there are two approaches of much value: the experiential and the exegetical. Either we discuss our experience of the text and talk ‘around’ it more than ‘about’ it, being explicit that what we find are our own feelings about it and reflections on it, or we dedicatedly pore over every single word like the Rabbis of the Bahir exploring the potential esoteric significance of the order of letters in the Tetragrammaton. Since I have not the skill nor time to do the latter, I have opted for the former approach. For this approach I am thus explicit that the quotations I have chosen to use in this essay are merely the ones that I liked, that appealed to me, and don’t pretend them to be ‘super-quotes’. They’re just ones I happened to want to use and want to talk about.

The Dissolving Fantasies of the Schizophrenic Text

“(one is continually firstmeeting with all sorts of others at all sorts of ages!)”

The characters of FW are, in my experiential reading, better described not as characters in a dream but as fantasies in the imagination of the text itself, a text better described as river-system-of-consciousness than as a stream-of-consciousness. What I mean by this is that they seem not as characters in a fiction, who we suspend our disbelief to imagine have lives independent of the book we are reading, but as fleeting pseudo-characters which are conjured up by the text, given a name, before they are once more dissolved into the primordial soup of the prose.

One of the simplest-to-understand definitions I can give of schizophrenia is that it is essentially a severe, crippling, chronic overactive imagination. This manifests itself in hallucination (sensing things which aren’t there), paranoia (finding excessive patterns), disorganisation (otherwise known as hebephrenia, thoughts forcing themselves into the fore and thus disrupting other thoughts) and fantasies (constructing fictional characters and narratives and living out scenes from their lives inside one’s own head). I myself am a keen fantasist, I very much enjoy my numerous characters and I find them incredibly useful in processing my own thoughts and opinions (I won’t go into detail about them because they’re very private, but suffice to say I know they aren’t ‘real’ and I have a lot of them).

This is I think the best framework (or at least the one I like best) to view FW’s characters. When they are summoned they instantly acquire a full life and start their appearance mid-way through a point or narrative, and as soon as their role is done they dissolve back into the unconscious, perhaps to be summoned again later on, perhaps not. Their dissolution in this manner is not stated by the text, they merely cease to be referred to and become lost in the prose, like a dinghy in a thunderstorm being pushed under the sea by a great wave. Some might be more popular (i.e. frequency of appearance), like HCE, some might be less popular, like Mutt and Jute. They shift between each other, just as I shift between fantasies unconsciously, as though my unconscious selected them for me and decided to explore a new one. They thus don’t have life independent of each other and certainly not independent of the prose.

This is why I’m not going to explore the idea of ‘Issy’s psychosis’ as has been often talked about before. As, in my schema, Issy is just another fantasy of FW, her schizophrenia is not what should be talked about but rather the prose’s schizophrenia.

I’m not alone in making the case for the text itself being schizophrenic, C.G. Jung himself (who it should be noted treated Joyce’s daughter Lucia) made this consideration:

“If you know anything of my anima theory, Joyce and his daughter are a classic example of it. She was definitely his femme inspiratrice, which explains his obstinate reluctance to have her certified… His ‘psychological’ style is definitely schizophrenic, with the difference, however, that the ordinary patient cannot help talking and thinking in such a way, while Joyce willed it and moreover developed it with all his creative forces.”

Where I differ from Jung’s view is that I don’t really consider FW as being ‘written by’ Joyce, rather I consider it to have been ‘written through’ him, by divine forces unknown. Many are keen to contextualise FW with Joyce’s life, his family and the history of Ireland (and the wider world), and this may be a worthy area of inquiry, but it’s untenable for me to explore because I simply cannot see the stamp of the author on the text like I would with most other books, like I would with Ulysses for example; I cannot see the human hand in FW’s creation. This is why I describe the text itself as schizophrenic and why I don’t make much mention of Joyce at all; the text is an entity of its own. This may be a controversial view, but only in the modern world; it would be accepted in the ancient world, where art was often viewed as coming from the Muses through the artist, and invoked often in literature as the inspiration, the true ‘creators’ of the piece.

In fact, I find it easier to imagine James Joyce himself as coming from FW’s imagination than the other way around. Perhaps James Joyce was himself a schizophrenic fantasy of FW, one so strong that the text hallucinated him into reality. This I would not dream of proposing as ‘historical fact’, but it is easier for me to imagine in this case, so moving and super-humanly written do I find the text.

Metaphysics, Quantum Physics, Schizophrenics

“Home all go. Halome. Blare no more ramsblares, oddmund barkes! And cease your fumings, kindalled bushies! And sherrigoldies yeassymgnays; your wildeshawehowe moves swiftly sterneward! For here the holy language. Soons to come. To pausse.

FW contains numerous references to the divine (an assumption - as I’ve outlined above), and in particular often to the Christian divine: references to Christ are dotted throughout the text. It is thus worth talking about Christ, and the nature of Christ: specifically in relation to Christology.

There is one Christology accepted widely across almost all Christian denominations (the Oriental Orthodox Church being the only major dissenter), and that is the Chalcedon Definition describing the hypostatic union of Christ:

“Following, then, the holy Fathers, we all unanimously teach that our Lord Jesus Christ is to us One and the same Son, the Self-same Perfect in Godhead, the Self-same Perfect in Manhood; truly God and truly Man; the Self-same of a rational soul and body… acknowledged in Two Natures unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the difference of the Natures being in no way removed because of the Union, but rather the properties of each Nature being preserved, and (both) concurring into One Person and One Hypostasis; not as though He was parted or divided into Two Persons, but One and the Self-same Son and Only-begotten God, Word, Lord, Jesus Christ…”

This seems to me the definition of a fundamentally schizophrenic nature of Christ, and one I agree with fully - Christ paradoxically and yet perfectly united as fully human and fully divine. This is the Christ that runs through the pages of FW, appearing frequently in it as the text makes machine-gun fire references to Biblical scenes and Churches. It is very appropriate, I feel, to describe FW as being in hypostatic union itself, fully and truly many things: fully a Rabelaisan farce, fully a mythopoetic odyssey, fully a waking dream, and fully a schizophrenic raving. These readings cannot be truly separated, for inherently to talk about one is to talk about the others as they are ‘indivisible’ and ‘inseparable’. One could say that Christ is thus a central metaphor of FW describing its workings; I prefer the admittedly more wild view that Christ (as I’ve described above in terms of divine inspiration) helped write it.

“Three quarks for Muster Mark!”

Here I will change focus and discuss quantum mechanics - an abrupt change perhaps but, as Félix Guattari says, “we should have the schizophrenic’s capacity to range across fields”, and this field-ranging is most certainly appropriate to discussion of FW. 

“Three quarks for Muster Mark!” is one of the most recognisable lines from the novel due to being the direct inspiration for the name of a quantum particle, the quark. And the reason for the name being chosen is I think most interesting: Murray Gell-Man, discoverer of the particle describes it thus:

“In 1963, when I assigned the name ‘quark’ to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been ‘kwork’. Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word ‘quark’ in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark". Since ‘quark’ (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with ‘Mark’, as well as ‘bark’ and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as ‘kwork’... From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark’ might be ‘Three quarts for Mister Mark’, in which case the pronunciation ‘kwork’ would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.”

While I fundamentally disagree with Gell-Man saying anything is ‘clearly intended’ in FW, I very much like that he chose to name his groundbreaking discovery in this way. Having already decided on the sound of the name, a chance encounter with a random section of FW spoke to him and demanded that he use it, so much so that he attempted to justify, through empiricist devotion typical to scientists, pairing the spelling with the pronunciation to allow for its use. The ‘three’ is mentioned by Gell-Man because there are six types of quarks and they always appear in opposed pairs, meaning three types of pair (up-down, top-bottom, strange-charm). I think it lazy to consider this to be pure coincidence, and I consider it grossly materialistic to interpret this as Glenn-Man constructing his own narrative around this section that is unconnected with the original ‘meaning’ of “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” It seems to me much more apt to consider FW (not Joyce himself) as being prescient and prophetic, containing the description of the quark within it multiple decades before the subatomic particle was discovered. After all, quarks existed when FW was published even if they had not yet been discovered by physicists, why should they not exist within FW even if they had not yet been discovered by physicists? Marcel Brion said of the text that,

“Joyce dashes the scenes of the world down pell-mell to find an unhackneyed meaning and a law that is not outdated in the arrangement he is afterward to give them. 

To do this it is fitting that he should at the outset break through the too-narrow restraints of time and space; he must have an individual conception of these dimensions and adopt them to the necessities of his creation.”

Why then should we view Finnegans Wake as only reflecting the time that came ‘before’ it was finished in 1939, and not the time that came (and will continue to come) ‘after’? Are these not the ‘too-narrow restraints of time and space’ that Brion wrote of?

I would not consider the text to be ‘outside of time’ or ‘timeless’, rather as being ‘full of time’, perhaps even ‘overloaded with time’. One thing the book is famous for is its never-ending loop, beginning with the latter half of a sentence and ending with the first half of one. It seems to me silly to then regard it as being reflective only of the past and present respective to when it was published - this would be again to apply logical rules of causality to a text that fundamentally rejects them. Here I will reiterate what I said above regarding quotation significance and ‘super-quotes’: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” is not more significant than other quotations nor is it emblematic, it was selected by Gell-Man because he liked it and it spoke to him, and selected by me for the same reason. The time-fullness of FW is something which runs through it, yet it is not what it is ‘about’, nor a theme, but a factor. Another quote that I liked relevant to this subject is,

“that they ad bîn “provoked” ay Λ fork, of à grave Brofèsor; àth é’s Brèak - fast - table;  ; acùtely profèššionally piquéd, to = introdùce a notion of time [ùpon à plane (?) sù ’ ’ fàç’e’] by pùnct! ingh oles (sic) in iSpace?!” (all Joyce’s punctuation)

When I read this, its bizarre formatting and punctuation reminded me of the strange, pseudo-language of computer code, which I personally find impenetrable. Of course, computer code did not exist when Finnegans was written, but the point is that I was reminded of it nonetheless: the date of publishing did not stop me from being reminded of it. Need I also mention the strange ‘iSpace’, pre-reminiscent of the definitely 21st century range of Apple products prefixed with a lower-case ‘i’? Finnegans contains the seeds and the fruit of the future, and I consider any opinion that regards these examples as ‘coincidence’ or ‘pattern-forming’ as being symptomatic of an era that no longer regards works of art as being divinely inspired. Prophecy is the domain of the schizophrenic and the religious, I am both, and Finnegans Wake is in my opinion also both.

Returning to subatomic particles, the story of the naming of the quark leads us onto a very relevant quantum phenomenon, that of wave-particle duality: where quantum particles (the quark included) exhibit properties both of particles and of light, in essence, existing as both - one might argue in hypostatic union:

“The strange conflict which has been waged between the wave theory of light and the light quantum hypothesis has resulted in a remarkable dilemma. But now we have a parallel dilemma, for a material particle manifests some of the attributes of wave motion… Radiation in free space is not open to observation, and is a mere abstraction. An isolated material particle likewise can never be observed and is also an abstraction. It is only through their interaction with other systems that the properties of these abstractions can be defined and observed.”

This is most effectively demonstrated by the double-slit experiment, which also demonstrates the strange significance of observing. When light is passed through two slits and the effect on a back wall is observed, the pattern the light forms is that of two streams of particles. When the effect is not observed, the pattern is that of a wave. The universe itself is essentially schizophrenic, it is a ‘split in mind’ (the etymology of ‘schizophrenia’), with its building blocks formed of a seemingly paradoxical, seemingly metaphysical dual nature.

What then is the relevance to FW? I propose that the text itself exhibits wave-particle duality. When we observe the text, i.e. by reading it, it appears to us in particle form, composed of letters and punctuation. But when we don’t observe it, when we aren’t reading it and the book is closed, it takes the form of a wave. What I mean by this is it exists when unobserved as pure literary radiation, not physically as letters and punctuation but as pure literary energy in wave-form. Of course, I have no way of ‘proving’ this, as to attempt to prove it would involve me observing, and thus in this schema changing, the text and collapsing the wave, but it seems to me an explanation for the text’s unparalleled fragmentation of the word, the sentence etc.; if they are not particles but waves when not observed then the literary quanta would interact very differently with one another, before we open the book up and they crystallise as particles. This is perhaps my flight of fancy, as I “range across fields”, but I am convinced of this schizophrenia in the nature of the text, written in a schizophrenic universe, saved by a schizophrenic Messiah in hypostatic union, read by a schizophrenic literature student and written about in my schizophrenic essay.

Conclusion: Time to Restart

“Now gode. Let us leave theories there and return to here’s here. Now hear.”

Finnegans Wake is an intensely paradoxical text, not least being that it’s one of the greatest works of world literature and yet would catastrophically fail a GCSE Creative Writing exam. Its paradoxes and idiosyncrasies defy classification, defy all expectations and assumptions of its reader and have earned it its reputation as one of the most difficult-to-read books ever written.  Many derided it as insane when it was released, many continue to deride it as insane now, many came to argue that ‘it’s not mad, it’s genius.’ Well I say it is insane, but I certainly do not deride it for that. FW’s insanity is what makes it so special, so unlike anything else ever written.

I am, to put it bluntly, a clinical madman, and perhaps it could be argued that I see madness in everything because of this, and have written an unhinged essay as a consequence. But I would reply that my source material too is unhinged, and that to approach it in a critical piece one must embrace. I think one needs at least a touch of madness to approach FW, lest we end up reducing it to something mundane and uninteresting, and approach it as a ‘code to crack’. The last thing, I think, one ought to do is try to make FW boring. I have tried in this essay to give FW as much respect as I can give it, and to respect it as an insane work, which is not now nor ever will be an insult to it. I have explored my relationship to the text.

We all will have our own relationship to FW, governed by our own experience of the world. Perhaps someone with a different experience of the world to me - perhaps, for example, a Professor of Irish Studies - will resoundingly disagree with my experience of FW, and much prefer their own. But I don’t pretend objectivity, because I think when talking of FW that would be hubristic. Ultimately I don’t think FW exists to be analysed. One does not, or at the least should not, analyse a meandering walk through a mystical forest. One absorbs the mysterious power of it like photosynthesis. One breathes in the intoxicating, olfactory-memory-triggering smells. And one gazes upon the expanse of trees stretching off into the 360 degree distance and recognises that one is in a liminal place. Finnegans Wake exists to be experienced, and I have testified to my experience.

“All halt! Sponsor programme and close down. That’s enough, genral, of finicking about Finnegan and fiddling with his faddles.”

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