The Impersonality of the Artist in Finnegans Wake I.5

This study examines the impersonality of the artist evinced in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake I.5. The ideal artist as expressed by Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man “like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Finnegans Wake seems to illustrate the hidden author remote from the sufferings of the reader, a reader lost in his vain efforts at the search for the meanings of the almost unreadable text. Joyce’s experiment in his last work can be seen as nearly impersonal sentence combinations and variation beyond all point of view. We cannot find the traces of the author on the surface. He suggests that it is not himself, but somebody else who wrote this work. Further, he implies that his voice is hidden behind multiple voices. That is why his work can be said to be plagiarized. He picks up the words and sentences of other people and pastes them in his work without quotation marks. As “the last word in stolentelling,” Finnegans Wake is the resulting rubbish of others’ words. However, these efforts at impersonality paradoxically make the figure of Joyce all the more conspicuous. Pretending to be refined out of existence and to pare his fingernails, the artist is actually involved in shaping our view of his work. Thus, it is not surprising for the author to say that the existence of the author is undeniable and that this “chaosmos” has a sort of order or structure despite its seeming chaos. Through the strategy of impersonality, Joyce seems to succeed in drawing the reader’s attention to his position as a modernist writer, and to the question of intertextuality characteristic of his works.