Why Finnegans Wake Abandons Episodes Altogether

Introduction: When Non-Commutativity Is No Longer Enough

Ulysses stretches narrative form to the point where episodes no longer commute. Each chapter operates under its own local logic; meaning emerges through traversal, not synthesis.

Finnegans Wake takes the next, more radical step.

It does not further multiply episodes.

It abandons episodicity itself.

This is not escalation for its own sake. It is a structural necessity once Joyce recognises that even non-commuting episodes still presuppose something too stable: identifiable segments, bounded cuts, recoverable local coherences.

The Wake dissolves those assumptions.

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1. Episodes Presuppose Cuts

An episode, however experimental, still implies:

• a beginning and an end

• a relatively stable internal regime

• a local coherence that can be entered and exited

Even when episodes do not commute, they remain cuts — distinguishable instantiations within a larger potential.

But what if the act of cutting itself becomes the problem?

What if the ontology Joyce is probing no longer permits stable perspectival segmentation?

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2. The Wake as Continuous Construal

Finnegans Wake does not move from episode to episode. It moves by continuous modulation.

There are:

• no clean transitions,

• no secure vantage points,

• no stable stylistic regimes that hold long enough to count as episodes.

Language itself becomes fluid:

• words fold into other words,

• languages bleed together,

• syntax slips without fully breaking.

This is not chaos. It is unbroken construal — meaning as an ongoing generative activity rather than a sequence of local actualisations.

The system no longer pauses to instantiate.

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3. Why Non-Commutativity Collapses Here

In Ulysses, we can still say:

Episode A followed by Episode B ≠ Episode B followed by Episode A.

In the Wake, that statement loses traction.

There is no stable A or B.

Only overlapping currents of sense-making.

Non-commutativity presupposes discrete operations.

The Wake removes discreteness.

Meaning does not fail to commute; it never separates enough to test commutation.

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4. Characters as Persistent Turbulence

HCE, ALP, Shem, Shaun, Issy — these are not characters in any classical sense, nor even in the Joycean Ulysses sense.

They are:

• recurring attractors,

• rhythmic condensations,

• zones of narrative gravity.

They do not persist as identities.

They persist as patterns of re-emergence.

You don’t track them through the text;

you recognise them as you might recognise a melody returning in a different key, tempo, or instrument — without ever being quite sure where it began.

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5. The Reader Loses the Right to Orientation

Perhaps the most ethically significant move in Finnegans Wake is this:

the reader is no longer entitled to orientation.

There is no privileged entry point.

No “correct” way in.

No expectation of eventual mastery.

This is not hostility. It is honesty.

The Wake refuses the comforting fiction that meaning must be graspable as a whole, even perspectivally.

Instead, it offers participation without possession.

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6. Why This Is Not Obscurity

The Wake is often accused of being obscure. This misunderstands its operation.

Obscurity implies something hidden.

The Wake hides nothing.

Everything is on the surface — but the surface is moving.

Meaning is not concealed; it is unstable by design.

What fails is not comprehension, but the expectation that comprehension should terminate.

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7. From Narrative to Ontological Demonstration

Seen in this light, Finnegans Wake is not primarily a novel. It is an ontological demonstration.

It shows — rather than argues — that:

• meaning is generative, not stored

• identity is recurrent, not fixed

• coherence is emergent, not guaranteed

• closure is a convenience, not a necessity

Where Ulysses trains the reader to tolerate non-commuting perspectives, the Wake trains the reader to tolerate groundlessness without collapse.

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Conclusion: When the Kaleidoscope Refuses to Pause

If Ulysses is a kaleidoscope you turn episode by episode,

Finnegans Wake is what happens when the instrument never stops turning.

There is:

• pattern without final picture,

• recurrence without identity,

• sense without settlement.

Joyce does not abandon meaning here.

He abandons the conditions under which meaning pretends to be finished.

The Wake does not ask to be solved.

It asks to be entered — again, and again, and differently each time.

And in doing so, it makes a quiet but radical claim:

meaning was never meant to come to rest.