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24 THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE 
as the primary point of reference both in Campbell and Robinson's A Skeleton
Key to "Finnegans Wake" and Clive Hart's Structure and Motif in "Finnegans
Wake." However, in order to accommodate Joyce's own suggestion that Finnegans
Wake is a night piece, the work had to be formulated as both novel and dream
by these critics. Clive Hart's scheme illustrates this combination most simply:
while the entire work is a dream, the content of the dream is a naturalistic
story.2 To put it another way, Finnegans Wake is a dream about a novelistic
story. Yet novels and dreams are based on fundamentally different approaches
to reality. Novels are rooted in eighteenth-century empiricist notions of
a unitary consciousness, while dreams are disguised messages from a censored
unconscious. 
 Since it schematizes collective rather than individual experience, Beckett's
Viconian model of the Wake does not share the novelistic premises of most
later criticism. However, like the interpretations of Campbell/Robinson and
Hart, the Viconian plan is also historical in its foundation on the linear
progress of events through time. The movement is both cyclical and evolutional:
events, though repeated at the end of the cycle, unfold in a logical and
necessary sequence.3 Such evolutional progress is difficult to discern in
the Wake. For example, both the battle of Waterloo early in the book (1.1)
and the nighttime stirrings of the Porter family near the end (111.4) represent
the sexual dynamics of the family, the particular incestuous engagements
that precipitate the fall of the father. Yet the expected political, moral,
and linguistic modulations that express the progress of Vico's ages from
Theocracy to Anarchy, from Birth to Decay, are not to be found in these episodes.
The banal domestic sexuality of the Porters is no more corrupt or anarchic
than the bawdy, raucous skirmish of Willingdone and the lipoleums. Nor do
we find the expected stylistic correspondence to the Viconian ages. The bedroom
sequence is not told in philosophical language, nor is the Museyroom battle
described in sacred words. Structurally, the two events are virtually identical:
the rebellious children rise against the father, and the father threatens
the sons and tempts the daughter with his phallus, the "wounderworker" with
"sexcaliber hrosspower" in the Museyroom (8.35—36), and the "drawn
brand" (566.24) in the nursery. The brother relationship is likewise identical
in nursery or adult confrontation. The passage of time separating the Mutt-Jute
exchange on the prehistoric mound, the fifth-century debate between St. Patrick
and the archdruid, and the twelfth-century