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''Finnegans Wake'' is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It is significant for its experimental style and reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language.〔(''Joyce, Joyceans, and the Rhetoric of Citation'' ), p 3, Eloise Knowlton, University Press of Florida, 1998, ISBN 0-8130-1610-X〕〔(''What Art is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand'' ), p 245, Louis Torres, Michelle Marder Kamhi, Open Court Publishing, 2000, ISBN 0-8126-9372-8〕 Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's death, ''Finnegans Wake'' was Joyce's final work. The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words, which many critics believe were attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams.〔 Owing to the work's expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and abandonment of narrative conventions, ''Finnegans Wake'' remains largely unread by the general public.〔Joyce critic Lee Spinks argues that ''Finnegans Wake'' "has some claim to be the least read major work of Western literature." Spinks, Lee. ''A Critical Guide to James Joyce'', (p.127 )〕〔Kitcher 2007〕 Despite the obstacles, readers and commentators have reached a broad consensus about the book's central cast of characters and, to a lesser degree, its plot. However, a number of key details remain elusive.〔James Atherton states that despite the amount of critical work "explaining (book's ) profundities from various viewpoints and in varying ways () agreement has still not been reached on many fundamental points" Atherton 2009, (p. ii ); Vincent Cheng similarly argues that "through the efforts of a dedicated handful of scholars, we are approaching a grasp of the ''Wake''. Much of ''Finnegans Wake'', however, remains a literary outland that is still barely mapped out." Cheng 1984, p.2〕〔(''The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce'' ), p 98, Eric Bulson, Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-521-84037-6〕 The book discusses, in an unorthodox fashion, the Earwicker family, comprising the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Issy. Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the book, in a nonlinear dream narrative,〔(''James Joyce A to Z'' ), p 74, A. Nicholas Fargnoli, Oxford University Press US, 1996, ISBN 0-19-511029-3〕 follows his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle to replace him, Shaun's rise to prominence, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn. The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment which continues from the book's unfinished closing line, making the work a never-ending cycle.〔(''Chaucer's Open Books'' ), p 29, Rosemarie P McGerr, University Press of Florida, 1998, ISBN 0-8130-1572-3〕 Many noted Joycean scholars such as Samuel Beckett〔via Beckett's signal contribution to ''Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress'' ("Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce")〕 and Donald Phillip Verene〔Giambattista Vico article in (''The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism'' )〕 link this cyclical structure to Giambattista Vico's seminal text ''La Scienza Nuova'' ("The New Science"), upon which they argue ''Finnegans Wake'' is structured. Joyce began working on ''Finnegans Wake'' shortly after the 1922 publication of ''Ulysses''. By 1924 installments of Joyce's new avant-garde work began to appear, in serialized form, in Parisian literary journals ''transatlantic review'' and ''transition'', under the title "fragments from ''Work in Progress''". The actual title of the work remained a secret until the book was published in its entirety, on 4 May 1939.〔(''The Oxford companion to Irish literature'' ), p 193, Robert Welch, Oxford University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-19-866158-4〕 Initial reaction to ''Finnegans Wake'', both in its serialized and final published form, was largely negative, ranging from bafflement at its radical reworking of the English language to open hostility towards its lack of respect for the conventions of the novel.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=From the archive: Who, it may be asked, was Finnegan? | From the Guardian | The Guardian )〕 The work has since, however, come to assume a preeminent place in English literature, despite its numerous detractors. Anthony Burgess has lauded ''Finnegans Wake'' as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page."〔 The prominent literary academic Harold Bloom has called it Joyce's masterpiece, and wrote that "() aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon (Wake'' ) would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante."〔(【引用サイトリンク】 Putting It Into Words ~ Finnegans Wake )〕 In 1998, the Modern Library ranked ''Finnegans Wake'' 77th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.〔 This ranking was by the (Modern Library Editorial Board ) of authors and critics; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was ranked third by the board and ''Ulysses'' was ranked as the best novel of the century.〕 ==Background and composition== Having completed work on ''Ulysses'', Joyce was so exhausted that he did not write a line of prose for a year.〔Bulson, Eric. ''The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce''. Cambridge University Press, 2006. Page 14.〕 On 10 March 1923 he wrote a letter to his patron, Harriet Weaver: "Yesterday I wrote two pages—the first I have since the final ''Yes'' of ''Ulysses''. Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double sheet of foolscap so that I could read them."〔Joyce, James. ''Ulysses: The 1922 Text''. Oxford University Press, 1998. Page xlvii.〕 This is the earliest reference to what would become ''Finnegans Wake''.〔Crispi, Slote 2007, p. 5〕 The two pages in question consisted of the short sketch "Roderick O'Conor", concerning the historic last king of Ireland cleaning up after guests by drinking the dregs of their dirty glasses.〔The piece would eventually become the conclusion of Book II Chapter 3 (FW: 380.07–382.30); cf Crispi, Slote 2007, p. 5.〕 Joyce completed another four short sketches in July and August 1923, while holidaying in Bognor. The sketches, which dealt with different aspects of Irish history, are commonly known as "Tristan and Isolde", "Saint Patrick and the Druid," "Kevin's Orisons" and "Mamalujo".〔Hofheinz, p. 120.〕 While these sketches would eventually be incorporated into ''Finnegans Wake'' in one form or another, they did not contain any of the main characters or plot points which would later come to constitute the backbone of the book. The first signs of what would eventually become ''Finnegans Wake'' came in August 1923 when Joyce wrote the sketch "Here Comes Everybody", which dealt for the first time with the book's protagonist HCE.〔Crispi, Slote 2007 pp. 12–13.〕 Over the next few years, Joyce's method became one of "increasingly obsessional concern with note-taking, since () obviously felt that any word he wrote had first to have been recorded in some notebook."〔Mailhos 1994, (p. 49 )〕 As Joyce continued to incorporate these notes into his work, the text became increasingly dense and obscure. By 1926 Joyce had largely completed both Books I and III. Geert Lernout asserts that Book I had, at this early stage, "a real focus that had developed out of the HCE (Comes Everybody" ) sketch: the story of HCE, of his wife and children. There were the adventures of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker himself and the rumours about them in chapters 2–4, a description of his wife ALP's letter in chapter 5, a denunciation of his son Shem in chapter 7, and a dialogue about ALP in chapter 8. These texts () formed a unity."〔Lernout, in Crispi, Slote 2007, p. 50〕 In the same year Joyce met Maria and Eugène Jolas in Paris, just as his new work was generating an increasingly negative reaction from readers and critics, culminating in ''The Dials refusal to publish the four chapters of Book III in September 1926.〔 The Jolases gave Joyce valuable encouragement and material support throughout the long process of writing ''Finnegans Wake'',〔Crispi, Slote 2007, p.22〕 and published sections of the book in serial form in their literary magazine ''transition'', under the title ''Work In Progress''. For the next few years Joyce worked rapidly on the book, adding what would become chapters I.1 and I.6, and revising the already written segments to make them more lexically complex.〔quoted in Crispi, Slote 2007, p. 22〕 However, by this time some early supporters of Joyce's work, such as Ezra Pound and the author's brother Stanislaus Joyce, had grown increasingly unsympathetic to his new writing.〔Ellmann 1983, pp. 577–585, 603〕 In order to create a more favourable critical climate, a group of Joyce's supporters (including Samuel Beckett, William Carlos Williams, Rebecca West and others) put together a collection of critical essays on the new work. It was published in 1929 under the title ''Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress''.〔''The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce'', Derek Attridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-521-37673-4, (p 174 )〕 In July 1929, increasingly demoralised by the poor reception his new work was receiving, Joyce approached his friend James Stephens about the possibility of his completing the book. Joyce wrote to Weaver in late 1929 that he had "explained to () all about the book, at least a great deal, and he promised me that if I found it madness to continue, in my condition, and saw no other way out, that he would devote himself heart and soul to the completion of it, that is the second part and the epilogue or fourth."〔quoted in Crispi, Slote 2007, p. 23〕 Apparently Joyce chose Stephens on superstitious grounds, as he had been born in the same hospital as Joyce, exactly one week later, and shared both the first names of Joyce himself and his fictional alter-ego Stephen Dedalus.〔Ellmann 1983, pp. 591–592〕 In the end, Stephens was not asked to finish the book. In the 1930s, as he was writing Books II and IV, Joyce's progress slowed considerably. This was due to a number of factors including the death of his father John Stanislaus Joyce in 1931;〔(''The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce'' ), p 15, Eric Bulson, Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-521-84037-6〕 concern over the mental health of his daughter Lucia;〔(''Ethical Joyce'' ), p 110, Marian Eide, Cambridge University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-521-81498-7〕 and his own health problems, chiefly his failing eyesight. ''Finnegans Wake'' was published in book form, after seventeen years of composition, on 4 May 1939. Joyce died two years later in Zürich, on 13 January 1941. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Finnegans Wake」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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