Joyce's Finnegans Wake: The Curse of Kabbalah

Abstract

This tenth in a series concludes this ground-breaking word-by-word analysis of Finnegans Wake, the literary monument which records James Joyce’s desperate search for spiritual connection. In the chapter covered by this volume, the main connecting links are reincarnation of ALP and reincarnation of the novel itself.

For his last weave, Tikkun Master Joyce joins strands of Kabbalah and Hinduism to launch a fully realized ALP. She comes to roost but in a new home on the far shore. ALP realizes independence as she throws off fear of the church, of males, and of death. The pivotal event for this purpose is closure provided by the funeral for Father Michael, ALP’s sexmailer. The resulting freedom gives her independence as well as what she already had, her instinctive charitable nature.

Given the unity of FW, it will come as no surprise that with this final development ALP shares soul with three of Joyce’s examples of godliness: Jesus, Buddha and highest art produced by humans. They all share the weave of independence and charity, Joyce’s conditions for the sacred. And these conditions turn on light within.

This chapter opens with the arrival of morning light within the Earwicker household and is anchored by a culminating debate between a dogmatic Catholic and a meditating Celt about reflected versus absorbed color [think absorbed light as light within]. Joyce chose light for this purpose because in a manner of speaking light is also a mixture of independence and charity.

Independent of the observer and time and space, light shows charity at the subatomic level. Light being absorbed shares vibrational energy with and thus energizes sympathetic electrons of the absorbing material, becoming light within. By contrast, light reflected is not absorbed and does not energize. Energy wise it is wasted.

Joyce presents ALP as having absorbed divine energy. She lights up from within with independent voltage. Reflecting her new realization, the final subject in ALP’s stream of consciousness is herself in the present in the stream of life. With this focus ALP merges into the novel and they both reincarnate back to the beginning.

The novel reincarnates by way of the joinder of the incomplete sentence fragment in the last line with the incomplete sentence fragment in the first line of Chapter 1. Together they make a whole. ALP’s spirit reincarnates to a new birth mother so as to assist in Tikkun, which so far is incomplete. Her reincarnated soul is to light up from within as it is absorbed by a newly born infant.

So as we finish this reading of FW, we uncover a mother lode of connections in Joyce’s light: ALP merges into FW; ALP’s soul reincarnates into another; the book joins its ending with its beginning in a reincarnation of rereading and new meanings; and a punning connection from Kabbala holds it all together. Connections: connections: connections.

About the Author

This non-academic author, a retired lawyer and lifelong Joyce reader, brings new approaches in an attempt to find the deep meaning of each of Joyce's chapters and the novel as a whole. The intended scope of this effort, the complete Joyce, is unique in an area monopolized by more narrowly-focused academics. "I found that the best way to understand the novels I loved in college was to write about them, so I have since 1995 been communing with them and writing literary analysis books about them as art forms, how they work as art. This series on Finnegans Wake is the challenge I put off until last. Let us hope it finishes before I do."