In 2001, Edward Burns and Joshua Gaylord published the correspondence between Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen, two Finnegans Wake pioneers who enthusiastically took on the task of reading this very complex book without the arsenal of secondary literature (topographic guides, annotations, lexicons, plot summaries) that readers have available today. What really kept them going seems to have been the idea that Finnegans Wake, like Ulysses, has a master key, one frame of reference to structure the book, just as Homer's epic was the key to Joyce's earlier book. At various moments each of the correspondents felt that he or she had found exactly such a key, but neither Wilder nor Glasheen ever managed to convince his or her correspondent.
Most readers of Finnegans Wake have now given up on ever finding a master key. Postmodern readers have resigned themselves to the fact that there may not have been a key at all, not for Joyce in writing the book, nor for us readers. These are not necessarily the same thing. It is clear that Joyce used Homer's epic as a major structuring device in writing the book, but Joyce criticism (and Joyce himself) soon enough grew weary of the overemphasis on Homeric parallels; for dedicated readers this book has so much more to offer than just the adventures of a Dublin Odysseus.
The trouble with Finnegans Wake is that the book is so rich and so complex that it functions as a Rorschach test in which every reader finds exactly what he set out to see. Finnegans Wake has been read as a successful psychoanalytic cure, as “the most formidable anti-fascist book” and as a deconstruction of logo- or fallocentrism. There is very little one can write about the book that has not yet been argued before (and the same is true of its opposite, if there is one). All of this leads most readers of the Wake to posit the eternal deferral of the text's meaning. Finnegans Wake is the sum of all of its interpretations and there is no such thing as a final meaning or a master key. All we have is eternal undecidability. This dogma (and it is no more than that; the statement cannot even be falsified) has not stopped some exegetes from trying, and George Cinclair Gibson is only the latest in a long series.
Wake Rites argues that the key to Finnegans Wake is Irish myth, more specifically the festival at Tara, the Teamhur Feis. Gibson bases his thesis partly on the recent revival of explicitly Irish readings of Joyce's work that have come in the wake of postcolonialism. But despite the presence of all of the trappings this is not (or not only) a scholarly study: one of the early readers of the book praises the author's scholarship and his “spiritual intuition.” Critical readers of Gibson's book will need the intuition, if only because we have very little solid evidence about what really happened at Tara. When Christianity reached Ireland, the pagan festivals were discontinued, and our knowledge of the Feis is based solely on Christian sources. In fact, the most solid evidence for the festival comes from the work of R. A. S. Macalister, whose work on early Irish history Joyce was aware of, but who is even more controversial than Gibson would have us believe.
This is where the intuition comes in; for his knowledge of the Tara festival Gibson bases himself not just on those very few sources that were available to Joyce, but also on much more recent work that has more to do with a New Age sense of spirituality than with scholarship. The author is nothing if not eclectic. He does not even distinguish between pagan and Christian Ireland, using pious legends and myths about Patrick on the same level as mainstream historical writings. More serious for his argument is his lack of distinction between “Irish” and “Celtic” and between these two relatively definable categories and what he calls “the druids,” a concept that is at least as rich and undecidable as the meaning of Finnegans Wake itself. It is surely a result of the intuition part of his research that he takes the mythological early parts of The Annals of the Four Masters as straight history. The same is true for his adoption of Macalister's theory that Saint Patrick's first celebration of Easter coincided with both a pagan festival and the vernal equinox, which gives us the Wake's date, Easter Sunday 433.
After an introduction outlining the “sacred coincidence” of Finnegans Wake and Teamhur Feis and its relevance for the overall structure and theme of Joyce's book, Gibson moves through the Wake chapter by chapter. First he gives you the outline of the plot (basing himself on John Gordon's work) and then he shows how the story is related to the happenings at Tara, typically using phrases such as “a striking resemblance,” “a curious parallel,” “nearly identical,” and “strongly suggests.”
Like Seamus Heaney, the author seems to be fascinated with primal violence. In a strange section Gibson himself seems to feel, with Macalister, that “we of Irish lineage” should accept the fact of ancient Irish cannibalism (contra Jonathan Swift, apparently) in order to come to “an appreciation of the honorable motives of our cannibal ancestors” (156). Anything can be grist for his mill: the discovery of Lindow man is supposed to have happened on an Irish fertility festival. Gibson thinks that there is no doubt that the victim is a Celt, that he is a nobleman (“quite possibly” royal) and that he is vulpine (because there is a fox hunt in the Wake). This particular body was found in black water, which also happens to be the meaning of the name Lindow, similar to that of Dublin. What Gibson fails to say is that Lindow is close to Manchester, that Lindow man is now at the British Museum, and that the evidence for ritual murder is inconclusive, to say the least. Despite Seamus Heaney's poems, the only bog body to have been found in Ireland had been buried there after a nonviolent death. Our fascination with ritual murder and cannibalism may say more about us than about the early Irish. And the same can be said about this book that has more to tell about the current condition of our culture than about Irish or Celtic history. Or about Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
