Finnegans Wake

ALP is the wife of HCE and the mother of Shaun, Shem, and Isabel. She is a positive, protective force who seeks to help, heal, and bring life to those around her. When her husband is accused of a crime, she writes a long letter defending him (though it is never delivered). She pities her introverted son Shem and shows him more favor than his brash, arrogant brother Shaun. Of all the members of the family, she is the one who exhibits the warmest and most genuine emotion. ALP is a wellspring of affection and love in a novel that masks such sincere emotions behind complexities, confusions, and abstract language. Even amid this chaos, ALP’s authentic affection shines through.

ALP is an important part of her husband’s identity. She does not demure herself to him, but she offers him unwavering support. Their similarities are shown in how their identities are reduced to initials. Like her husband, Anna Livia Plurabelle becomes known simply as the initials of her three names. ALP and HCE are the only characters in the novel to share this trait, again illustrating their closeness compared to everyone else. The cyclical nature of the narrative means that the husband and wife are foregrounded at different points. HCE is the dominant figure in the early part of the novel, but his identity becomes so diffuse and scattered throughout the narrative that ALP emerges as the dominant figure at the novel’s end. Her letter and then her monologue form the final part of the story. However, this separation is portrayed as a single cohesive cycle. HCE and ALP are telling a single story, just as her closing line and his opening line form the same sentence. Their characters work in tandem, creating a balanced narrative cycle of death and rebirth.

ALP’s most important identity is that of the River Liffey. After narrating her letter in Part 4, she imagines herself as the Liffey flowing through Dublin. In this moment, she illustrates how she and her husband are inseparable, as he is the living embodiment of Dublin. More than that, however, her role as the Liffey is to always move forward, to press relentlessly toward the ocean, and to carry the pain and trauma of the city out to sea where it can become lost and ignored. ALP as the Liffey is a powerful, revitalizing figure who brings the departed HCE back into the narrative through sheer force of will and sincerity of affection. She carries away the complexity and the pain of his past and his many identities, cleansing and purifying his character so that he can be reborn.

Shaun is the louder, more assertive son of HCE and ALP. Unlike his twin brother Shem, he is a carrier of information rather than a creator. A key role he plays in the novel is that of the Post, a man whose job is to deliver letters. As this postman, Shaun is tasked with delivering his mother’s letter to the court, but the letter never arrives. Shaun rarely succeeds as his own struggles with identity bog him down. While he feels fit to inherit his father’s responsibilities, he struggles to assert himself over his twin brother. He maligns Shem and criticizes Shem’s artistic sensibilities. Shaun, positioning himself as the stronger and the more practical of the two, fails just as much as Shem. The letter is never delivered, his journeys are never completed, and his battles against Shem take up so much time and energy that Shaun exhausts himself before he is ready to take on his father’s mantle.

As such, Shaun comes to be defined by his anxieties. He is a deeply insecure figure who is aware of the difficulty of replacing his father and allows this knowledge to overwhelm him. He struggles so much to show the world that he is the better brother that he fails to relate to the world around him. Shaun cannot distinguish himself as an individual, only through competition with his brother. In this sense, there is no version of Shaun that cannot exist without Shem, as Shaun is so totally defined by his sibling rivalry that he cannot exist without it. Almost every identity that Shaun inhabitants is equally as competitive and as competitive as Shaun, whether he is Mutt, Jaun, Kevin, or anyone else.

Shaun fails. He fails to deliver his mother’s letter, he fails to distinguish himself from his brother, and he fails to prove himself as an adequate inheritor of his father’s responsibilities. After all the effort Shaun expends in trying to identify himself to the world, he is trapped in the crushing anxieties of his own identity crisis. All he can do is take credit for Shem’s achievements and then belittle his brother or lust after his sister, showing how he is struggling to escape his familial expectations and demands by pressing back against social taboos of fratricide and incest. Shaun wrestles with these boundaries because he can only engage with complicated ideas through violence and transgression. He treats his own search for identity like he treats everything else, as a constant battle with his twin brother. He only succeeds in showing that the two twins are part of a single whole who must work together, rather than strong individuals in their own right.

If Shaun is the postman in Finnegans Wake, then Shem is the penman. Like everything involving the two brothers, their roles and narratives are reflections of one another. They exist in constant competition as they battle to inherit their father’s responsibilities. While HCE embodies many mythological and historical figures from the past, Shem and Shaun must spread their diffuse personalities across two individuals. Shaun is the brash, active, and violent brother, while Shem is the withdrawn, artistic, and weak-willed brother. He is more interested in his own thoughts than his brother, as evidenced by their competing notes in the margin of their textbook. While Shaun tries to provoke his brother, Shem passively comments on the text and tries to find actual meaning in the words while ignoring his brother’s desire for violence.

Shem also functions as a counterpart for the author of Finnegans Wake, James Joyce. At several points in the novel, the artistic and introspective Shem plays the role of Joyce ruminating on his own history. Joyce left Ireland during a period of great upheaval when Ireland was fighting for its independence against the British colonial forces. During this time, Joyce lived in several European countries and focused on his writing. In Finnegans Wake, Shaun plays the role of Joyce’s brother, criticizing the artistic and introspective Joyce for failing to stand up for his country in a time of need. Joyce subjects himself to the same kind of rigorous self-critique with which he treats his other characters, but the ultimate suggestion is that Joyce himself—like so many historical, mythological, and fiction personas in the novel—has become an essential part of the cultural history of Ireland. With his failures and anxieties, Joyce is now a part of the Irish cultural identity, which is why his own psyche must be explored. Shem is not so much a direct portrayal of Joyce but the fictional embodiment of Joyce’s ideals and failures.