Work In Progress

How do you read a book that is also a city, a river, and a rehearsal hall? In this Work in Progress (the seedbed of Finnegans Wake), Joyce argues that a modern epic must sound like the place that makes it. He contends that language, ritual, and rumor create communal reality—and to see that, you must read not just what the text says but how it is spoken, staged, drafted, and materialized. The book opens the workshop windows: you witness multiple drafts, ballads turned into news, mock trials that reveal civic power, and a river—Anna Livia—that keeps time by circling back.

You move through three intertwined systems. First, language behaves like an orchestra: portmanteau neologisms (“roranyellgreeblindigan”), hybrid registers (pub slang beside legalese), and onomatopoeia (“Brékkek Kékkek… Kóax Kóax!”) make sound itself carry meaning. Second, time behaves like a river: “riverrun” returns you to Howth Castle and Environs; falls become wakes; dreams flip to morning processions. Third, identity behaves like ritual and paperwork at once: archetypal figures (H.C.E., A.L.P., Shem/Shaun/Jaun/Yawn) recur in fables and pageants while documents (letters, envelopes, stains, “four perforations”) record, distort, and authorize public memory.

The city sings: language as score

You don’t read only for plot; you listen for parts. Joyce layers liturgical cadence with street patter, nursery rhyme with parodied court proceedings. Hosty’s ballad in “The Cad Kernel” travels from rumor to song to social record; “Zinzin” echoes like a fairground refrain beside mock Latin and legalese (“Will you swear or affirm the day to yur second sight noo…”). Read aloud and you hear how voices make authority—songs stick, trials perform truth, and letters speak in stains and marginalia.

The river keeps time: cycles, falls, wakes

“Riverrun” is both method and map. Tim Finnegan’s fall demands a wake, and every wake renews social memory. Night chapters drift through dreamscapes (sleeping Porters, Isobel in her cot) and arrive in morning spectacle (bells, mayoral addresses, parades). Anna Livia Plurabelle personifies this circulation: a laundress-mother-river whose washing, gifting, and gossip bind an entire city. Time loops through water, song, and pageant, so you locate meaning in returns, refrains, and motifs rather than linear plot.

Archetypes walk among us: doubles and types

H.C.E. is “Here Comes Everybody”—a public Everyman whose scandal multiplies through rumor and law. A.L.P. carries the river’s many (Plurabelle) in one voice. Doubled fables (“The Mookse and the Gripes,” “The Ondt and the Gracehoper”) dramatize complementary senses—sight versus hearing, prudence versus play—so you learn to hold opposites together. Tristan and Isolde mingle with pub flirtation; King Roderick O’Conor becomes a comic emblem of fallen sovereignty; Saint Kevin excavates a tub that is both miracle and civil engineering.

Documents as actors: reading the page as object

Joyce turns paleography into plot. The “proteiform document” section inventories envelopes, thumbprints, “tea stains,” missing quotation marks, and the “penelopean patience of its last paraphe.” Lists of grotesque book titles (“Cock in the Pot for Father,” etc.) function as a parodic library that charts a culture’s anxieties. The text insists that material traces—perforations, smudges, mock seals—do social work: they authorize, mislead, and multiply identity (Note: think of Nabokov’s Pale Fire or Borges’s libraries as later kin).

Thesis in a sentence

“The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture”: the book is an instrument whose faces are song, stain, rumor, law, myth, and joke—turn it and it plays a new chord.

City as stage: ritual, pageantry, satire

From Feenichts Playhouse’s “Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies” to bonfires on “every bald hill,” civic life appears as choreography. Mock trials reveal justice as performance; “Donnicoombe Fairing” and the “Thousand to One Guinea-Gooseberry’s Lipperfull Slipver Cup” expose how spectacle fabricates status. Boosterism (“Visitez Drumcollogher-la-Belle!”) and poverty catalogues (“respectable… dead sick of bread and butter”) lay bare the comic ethics of excess: when rhetoric balloons, you see the seams of power.

What does this mean for you? Read the book as you would a city festival program and a case file at once. Track motifs (river, fall, wake; letter, stain, seal). Recognize archetypes as roles you already know. Let sound lead sense. And when lists pile up or speeches swell, listen for satire cutting through. The lesson is practical and portable: in any culture, language, ritual, and paperwork don’t just report reality—they make it.

Joyce lets you watch him build, unbuild, and rebuild. Part 1 displays an excavation site of composition—“First draft, March 1923,” “Fourth draft, July 1923”—for scenes that become Finnegans Wake. This transparency changes how you read: a paragraph is not a verdict but a trial run; variants are his fingerprints. You see what he amplifies (folklore, social satire), what he trims (encyclopedic overgrowths), and how he toggles between anecdote and orchestral prose.

How visible drafting becomes meaning

In the Saint Kevin sequence, an “Abandoned extension, ?May 1923” swells into liturgical parody before later tightening. H.C.E. evolves from “Humphrey Coxon,” the gardener saluting royalty with a flowerpot, into “Harold Chimpden Earwicker,” an Everyman under grander juridical satire. Roderick O’Conor moves from simple convivial scene to operatic burlesque of sovereignty. When Hosty’s ballad repeats across drafts, new epithets and local names accrete, like barnacles on a boat; the song becomes a city’s gossip archive.

Periodical frames and paratext as chorus

Headers—“From Work in Progress the transatlantic review No. 4,” “transition No. 1”—interrupt narrative with documentary notes. They remind you that the work circulated serially, with typesetters, editors, and readers in play. That editorial voice is not neutral; it’s another persona. When Joyce uses markers (registered symbol Æ, mock legal headings), he signals that publication context—the magazine page, the printer’s marks—belongs to the fiction’s world.

Drafting as dramaturgy

“You can see the novel being built, unbuilt and rebuilt”: variants are stage directions. Joyce shows you the rehearsal—then keeps the footlights on in the final show.

What you learn by watching versions

You detect three gains. First, voice evolution: compare the plain “First draft” Roderick to the ornate “Fourth”; you hear how a storyteller turns conductor. Second, structural choice: genres are laboratories—hagiography for Saint Kevin, ballad for Hosty, mock history for O’Conor. Third, composition cues: repetition and parenthetical notes mark places where Joyce tests readability against music. Seeing him cut or riot with syntax calibrates your ear for what the finished Wake will do.

How to read in a workroom

Treat a “draft” tag as an invitation to compare. Ask: which details survive? Which jokes multiply? Where does the myth thicken or the satire sharpen? When a sequence balloons (Kevin’s bath-altar liturgics) and later trims, Joyce is calibrating ritual density for intelligibility and rhythm. When legalese creeps into H.C.E.’s story, he is grafting the public’s accusatory machinery onto a private misstep—composition mirrors social dynamics.

(Note: This openness anticipates contemporary “genetic criticism” and the published notebooks of writers like Beckett. It models a pedagogy: you learn to read a text as process, not product.)

Why it matters beyond Joyce

When you watch a work evolve, you develop a habit—trace meaning through revision. You can apply it anywhere: in policy drafts, brand slogans, or family legends, the changed word signals a shifted power or value. Joyce’s drafts make that logic tactile. He teaches you to ask, in any story: who added the legal tone? who trimmed the hymn? which refrain hardened into public memory? In this book, composition is content, and the workshop is the first classroom.

Joyce treats words like instruments—bendable, fusable, percussive. You hear English spliced with Gaelic, French, Latin, and faux-German; you meet portmanteaus that pack etymologies and jokes into a single token—“mastabatoom,” “plutherplethoric,” “arthurious.” Instead of translating every unit, you ride the rhythm and ask what a passage does: chant, mock, baptize, or seduce. Polyphony, not prose, is the default.

Portmanteau and hybrid registers

Coinages like “roranyellgreeblindigan” (a heptachromatic gag braided with mock-scientific pomp) make sound create sense. Legal interrogations (“Will you swear or affirm the day to yur second sight noo…”) collapse solemnity into dialect, exposing theater in law. Street cries (“Zinzin”) rub shoulders with hymn echoes; “Nous sommes, nous sommes!” pops like a chorus. The effect is not chaos but social density: languages index communities that press against each other in Dublin’s lanes.

Onomatopoeia and the score of the city

Sequences like “Brékkek Kékkek… Kóax Kóax Kóax!” render birds, bells, and fair drums. Speak them and you build the scene’s soundscape. Hosty’s ballad in “The Cad Kernel” uses refrain and scansion to convert rumor into memory. Tristan/Isolde parodies switch from lyric tenderness to ribald rugby register; the switch performs class crossing and comic deflation in a single breath.

Reading rule

Let sound lead sense. If a word won’t “translate,” tag its function: hymn, jeer, catalog, curse. Meaning returns by the chorus.

How to decode without drowning

Anchor on stems and names—H.C.E. (Here Comes Everybody), Anna Livia, Earwicker, Mamalujo. Track phonetic motifs (“river/run,” “roll”) and watch how they echo across scenes. Context sets your filter: in Saint Kevin, listen for Latinate pastiche; in tavern scenes (Roderick O’Conor), expect coarse patter and convivial rhyme. You don’t need to parse every morpheme. Reading is triage: keep the music, file the joke, and move with the current.

Why the mix matters

The polyglot texture is political and comic. It mirrors colonial and postcolonial Ireland where languages overlap in the ear; it satirizes pomp (fake Latin mottos like “Hery Crass Evohodie”) and bureaucratic jargon (pseudo-legal formulas that sound like spells). It also democratizes authorship: ballads, letters, sermons, gossip—all register as co-authors of public truth. (Compare Gertrude Stein’s repetition-as-structure; Joyce adds civic anthropology to the mix.)

For you, this method recalibrates reading as listening. You stop demanding single meanings and start collecting harmonics. The payoff is joy and acuity: the city’s voices become legible, and you can hear where solemnity overreaches or where a chorus smuggles a verdict past the bench.

Time in this book flows, eddies, and returns. “Riverrun” brings you back to Howth Castle and Environs; falls call wakes; nights dream into morning parades. You stop looking for straight lines and start listening for cycles—refrains that recur with new clothes. Water is the engine and Anna Livia Plurabelle is its voice: she launders, gifts, scolds, and blesses, carrying domestic detail and mythic charge in the same current.

Fall, wake, resume

Tim Finnegan’s great fall becomes both anecdote and cosmology. Communities answer with a wake: song, ballad (Hosty’s rann), blame, defense (A.L.P.’s letter). The loop repeats in miniature—each scandal or stumble generates a chorus—and in macro—the whole book’s circular form. Roderick O’Conor’s heeltapping through winespilth simultaneously completes and repeats a feast; the act is ritualized through retelling.

Night into morning: dream/wake choreography

You drift past the sleeping Porter household; children (Frank Kevin, Jerry Jehu) dream as neighbors’ sounds seep through walls. At “lighting up o’clock,” bells ring; the mayor receives dignitaries; bands strike up; the playhouse opens its doors. Private dream becomes public pageant, stitching personal memory to civic ritual. Repetition—night/day, annual festivals—binds individuals into communal time.

Reading cue

Follow water, song, and list. When plot thins, motifs thicken—baptism tubs, ale dregs, river-words—guiding you through the current.

Anna Livia: river as person, person as city

A.L.P. is mother, mattress, laundress, and cultural artery. “She sampood herself with galawater” and “wove a garland” while distributing bread, gossip, and gifts. Around her, markets and marriages cluster; women judge and defend her; rumors police her sexuality even as votive speech venerates her. She’s Plurabelle—many—because the river gathers the city’s loves, sins, and surnames and keeps them moving.

Ritual water and sacred returns

Saint Kevin’s bath-altar—water summoned seven times into an excavated tub—becomes a local cosmogony: ritual creates landscape, and landscape anchors memory. Baptism, laundering, drowning (Pharaoh’s echo), and libation cycle through the chapters. Water regenerates and erodes at once; it is the book’s moral weather. You learn to read with an ear for recurrence: the same chords come back with new harmonics.

Practically, this frees you from linear anxiety. You can enter almost anywhere, track a motif, and feel continuity. In a culture saturated with loops—news cycles, timelines, anniversaries—Joyce’s river-time feels modern: understanding happens when you notice how the refrain changes the next time around.

Characters here are roles you recognize: the public man under rumor (H.C.E.), the river-mother (A.L.P.), the bookish provocateur (Shem), the raconteur/postman (Shaun), the romantic Everyman (Jaun), the liminal sleeper (Yawn), the convivial but fallen king (Roderick O’Conor), the ascetic-engineer (Saint Kevin), the four nostalgic waves (Mamalujo). Joyce uses archetypes so the city can rehearse itself; he uses doubles so you learn to hold competing virtues together.

H.C.E. and A.L.P.: public man, public river

H.C.E. shifts names (“Humphrey Coxon,” “Haromphreyld,” “Harold Chimpden Earwicker”) as tone shifts from anecdote to juridical satire. “Here Comes Everybody” is both name and acronym—an Everyman who collects blame, legend, and law. A.L.P. writes the “Revered Letter” to defend him, her voice fusing domestic pride and public rhetoric. Together they stage how a city constructs and contests reputation.

Shem/Shaun/Jaun/Yawn: facets of social being

Shem writes, provokes, and hoards scraps; Shaun carries, retells, and boasts with tender bravura; Jaun sings courtship in ritual boasts; Yawn lies “on the mead of the hillock,” a body that attracts kings and gossips—the community’s projection screen. These are less “psychological portraits” than social functions: writer, messenger, lover, monument.

Fables of complementarity

In “The Mookse and the Gripes,” the Mookse sees but can’t hear; the Gripes hears but can’t see. In “The Ondt and the Gracehoper,” prudence warps into pinched conservatism while exuberance risks improvidence. Joyce refuses a single moral; he shows what each vision misses and lets figures like Nuvoletta—whose plunge reconciles stasis and flow—point to synthesis. Your task is to hold both and watch the river bring them together.

Reading practice

When you meet a pair, ask: complementary roles or warring values? Then look for the third thing—river, chorus, letter—that braids them.

Myth localizes, locals mythologize

Tristan and Isolde migrate into pub flirtation and fairground vows; Roderick O’Conor’s dignity sloshes with ale; Saint Kevin’s holiness digs drains and “bath-altars.” Archetypes keep the book flexible: any scene can carry epic weight; any epic can be punctured by gossip. The result is a civic mirror: you see how your town’s roles (mayor, singer, priest, fan) are greater than and smaller than the myths they cradle.

Authority in this book is a performance. You hear ballads (Hosty), letters (A.L.P.), sermons (Berkeley/Patrick parody), court interrogations, editorial headers (“transition No. 1”), and stage directions (Feenichts Playhouse). No single narrator rules; a chorus does. Truth emerges not from one voice but from interfaces: rumor turned into song; a letter read aloud by neighbors; a trial cross-exam that collapses under its own dialect ornament.

Paratext as character

Magazine credits, “From Work in Progress,” and pseudo-document labels create an editorial persona that frames without guaranteeing fact. Even a “document” is a player with an angle. By keeping those frames on stage, Joyce shows you how publication itself—headers, dates, typesetting—shapes reception. (Think of scrolling a news app: the tag and timestamp shape your trust before the text does.)

Mock trials and the theater of justice

A flood of “Will you swear or affirm…” questions jumbles legal formality with colloquial nudge; witnesses (Tarpey, Johnny, “Masta Cheeryman”) contradict and embroider. The spectacle exposes law as rhetoric under spotlight: the more tangled the question, the more visible the theater. Multiplying witnesses parodies procedure while diagnosing a civic truth: consensus is a chorus effect, not an evidence dump.

Ballads, letters, sermons: circulations of power

Rumor moves park→lodginghouse→pub→song→print. A.L.P.’s “Revered Letter” straddles private plea and public pamphlet. Hagiographic pastiche (Saint Kevin) “officiates” belief; liturgical cadence carries civic mood. Each register has a contract—chorus expects response; sermon expects assent; letter expects sympathy. Joyce makes you hear those contracts and notice who benefits when the crowd sings back.

Question to keep asking

Who gains authority by speaking in this register? Who is being ventriloquized?

How to listen across layers

Before decoding a claim, tag the voice: ballad, brief, homily, editorial. Then map its route: where did it come from; where is it going next? This turns the book into a lab for your media literacy. You learn to hear how any institution—press, church, court—wins trust by cadence, costume, and chorus, not only by content.

Joyce teaches you to read the page as an object with fingerprints. A long middle stretch riffs on letters, envelopes, stains, perforations, and spoof libraries. The thesis line—“The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture”—asks you to rotate the artifact and see new faces: handwriting pressure, misshapen capitals, missing quotes, the “penelopean” flourish, even “four perforations” punched as stop signs. Documents are characters; paleography is plot.

Forensics of the everyday

The “bordereau” catalogue inventories smudges and marks as clues: thumbprints, tea stains, ink blots, and a melted negative that forges identity (Biddy Doran’s letter). Lists of pseudo-books (“I Led the Life, Through the Boxer Coxer Rising”) build a satirical archive of tastes, scandals, and scholarly pretensions. Even punctuation becomes weaponizable—“four perforations” can encode a rhythm as surely as commas.

Multiplicity of hands, multiplicity of selves

The narrator insists that close inspection “would reveal a multiplicity of personalities inflicted on the documents.” A single hand can split into masks; an official seal can multiply authority; a stain can reassign a letter’s path. This is not hobbyist philology; it’s civic sociology. In a city where reputations hinge on papers—indictments, affidavits, parish rolls—the artifact’s quirks steer lives.

Interpretive rule

“To concentrate solely on the literal sense… is just as hurtful… as to ignore the garments a woman wears when you look at her.” Read the wrapper with the text.

Enumeration as x-ray

Joyce’s gigantic catalogues—of titles, professions, parish personae—do diagnostic work. Accumulation reduces grandeur to farce (the longer the honorific list, the more threadbare the authority) and maps a culture’s anxieties by frequency (what comes up again and again?). Enumeration is not excess; it’s structure. Meaning accretes by lists the way silt builds an island.

How to use this method yourself

Adopt artifact awareness. When you read an email, an online post, a municipal form, note the metadata, format, typos, watermarks. Ask what they perform: authority, haste, concealment, solidarity. Joyce’s paleography trains you to see the cultural life of documents; the skill travels—from archives to inboxes.

Public life here is stagecraft. Feenichts Playhouse hosts “The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies” with full apparatus—producers (Brothers Bratislavoff), chorus, program notes. Fairs (“Donnicoombe Fairing”), sporting extravaganzas (“Thousand to One Guinea-Gooseberry’s Lipperfull Slipver Cup”), bonfires “on every bald hill,” and royal progresses script a town’s belonging. You learn the anatomy of a gathering: summons, procession, contest, fallout—joy and feud braided together.

Theatre mirrors the town

Cast, audience, patrons—everyone finds a role. Stage directions double as civic instructions; repeated cues (“Every evening at lighting up o’clock…”) give the city its pulse. The “Pageant of History” sets singers and orchestration to reenact the past, keeping it pliable. Performance is not escapism; it’s how memory negotiates guilt, pride, and identity.

Fairs as social laboratories

A single fair births marriages and feuds: “hooneymoon and her flame went huneysuckling” beside “some family feud felt a nick in their name.” Vendors, bands, and brawlers share a street; status is confirmed by visibility (“the burgher popped out of his lairs”). Press coverage parodies itself into spectacle; “Up Lancs!” becomes as much branding as battle cry.

Key function of ritual

Ritual is a memory machine. It repeats the town to itself until the story sticks—sometimes as truth, sometimes as joke.

Private rites feed public shows

Laundry basins, pub toasts, wakes in kitchens—all are informal theaters. A.L.P.’s washing scene doubles as liturgy; Hosty’s street song is an itinerant press release. The domestic and the spectacular are two sides of one economy: habits supply material to pageants; pageants sanctify habits. (Compare Hardy’s village fairs; Joyce adds urban cacophony and meta-theatrical wit.)

How to read crowd scenes

Track scripts, props, and audiences. Who calls; who responds; what uniform is language wearing (hymn, headline, herald)? Spectacle always negotiates power—front pews, leading banners, who speaks from the balcony. The pageant’s glitter is a diagnostic lamp; you see hierarchy clarified by choreography.

Beneath the music, a steady satire works like an x-ray. Institutions—courts, police, clergy, press—are voiced in exaggerated idioms that reveal their stagecraft. Civic boosterism inflates into mock-heroic (“Visitez Drumcollogher-la-Belle!”), while a forensic catalogue of households exposes the moral fiction of “respectability.” Excess—lists, epithets, pageant pomp—functions as ethics: it pushes pretension past credibility so you can judge.

Courts and the comedy of procedure

Parody legalese piles up clauses, dialect, and threats until solemnity buckles. Multiplying witnesses (Tarpey, Johnny, “Masta Cheeryman”) demonstrate that justice is a performance calibrated for audience, not an oracle. The joke bites: institutions decide truth by rhetoric and repetition as much as by evidence.

Boosterism and the municipal epic

The town-monologue turns drains, levies (“murage and lestage”), and twinminsters into epic trophies; mock orders and mottos (Danabrog, “Hery Crass Evohodie”) garnish petty office with imperial aura. The civic résumé—bridges, terminals, domes—reads like battle honors. You recognize modern branding at work; Joyce just magnifies it to comic scale.

The poverty catalogue and bureaucratic pity

“Respectable, whole family attends daily mass and is dead sick of bread and butter.” Case files stack: shared closets, damp rooms, parole notes, quarterly removals. The administrative tone converts compassion into classification. By listing relentlessly, the book demands that you feel how labels manage sympathy and resources.

Ethics of excess

When rhetoric swells, watch for mask and motive. The laughter is a scalpel, not a shrug.

Press, sport, and spectacle economics

Sports reports and headlines hitch themselves to fairs and regattas (“Thousand to One… Cup”), amplifying civic vanity. Clerical pomp coexists with pub roar; bells ring through brawls. The point is not cynicism but literacy: notice where ceremony converts into power and who profits materially or symbolically from the show.

Joyce binds myth to topography so that place holds time. Saint Kevin’s sevenfold water-raising fashions a bath-altar—both miracle and engineering—turning ritual into infrastructure and site-making. King Roderick O’Conor lurches through drink as a comic national memory; Tristan and Isolde refract through local courtship; Viking and Armada echoes braid continental history into Dublin’s lanes. Myth is not past; it’s a tool citizens use to narrate themselves.

Saint Kevin: sanctity as civic tech

The saint excavates “a seventh part of one full fathom,” summons water seven times, anoints, and sits compline in a tub. His rite makes a place (yslet, lake altar) that organizes pilgrimage and memory. The miracle’s literalism—digging, measuring, bathing—shows how sacred stories justify and maintain civic structures (wells, shrines, baths) as much as they evoke piety.

National memory as palimpsest

Roderick O’Conor, Art MacMurrough Kavanagh, the Black Watch, Flemish fleets—names layer like graffiti. The great and the petty fuse: “What did he do, poor old Roderick O’Conor Rex… he just went heeltapping through the winespilth.” This vernacular historiography resists official, teleological nationalism. Memory becomes collage: ballad, gossip, and pageant each add a tile.

Anna Livia as cultural archive

A.L.P. carries surnames, sins, festivals, and children downstream. Her domestic cycle (washing, gifting, scolding) doubles as civic ritual (votive speech, hymned lists). When neighbors gossip about her lovers, they police morality; when the crowd chants her name, they canonize it. Plurabelle means many: tributaries of identity converge in one current.

Practical lens

Walk your city as Joyce walks Dublin: ask which rituals made this corner sacred and which stories keep it so.

How to use myth without being used by it

Treat legends as living theatre: they mobilize crowds, soothe losses, and legitimize hierarchies. But read them with the Wake’s double vision: honor their binding power and note the burlesque that keeps them honest. The city endures by performing its myths and parodying them—often in the same song.