ABSTRACT
Indeed, the more Finnegans Wake is explained, the less at times it is understood-which is a not uncommon pattern of response. Fog, together with cloud and rain, constitutes the natural ambience of this text, and becomes in turn emblematic of the relationship between it and the reader. At the opening of chapter 3 the reader is invited to ‘Chest Cee!’ But the fog is ‘Sdense’ that the reader becomes the object of scorn, out of place, a ‘spoof of visibility in a freakfog’ (48.1-2). Nothing is clear-not even the reader’s desire for clarity, which is being in some way spoofed-though there may be temporary, if misplaced, relief in that it is only a ‘freakfog’. For much of the text, the reader is like ‘Head-in-Clouds’ (18.23), anxiously awaiting the proverbial breaks in the clouds for a view of the earth below. But the fog continues. The first and last chapters of Book 3 begin with a reference to it-‘White fogbow spans’ (403.6); ‘What was thaas? Fog was whaas?’ (555.1)—and it is not until the final chapter that we are confidently, though perhaps ironically, informed by someone that the ‘smog is lofting’ (593.6-7). Not for nothing did Joyce refer to Finnegans Wake as his ‘experiment in interpreting “the dark night of the soul”’. 1 We can go further and, in the light of Roland Barthes’s attack on the distinction between the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of writing, 2 add that this experiment is intensified for the reader by Joyce’s familiar coupling of experience and writing, by which means he underscores the fact that writing too is ‘experience’.
