The attempt to locate narrative momentum in Finnegans Wake has been a critical concern ever since its initial serial publication as Work in Progress. One could almost say that the history of Wake criticism has been a continuing attempt to provide some get-up-and-go to Joyce's eschewal of "goahead plot" (LIII: 146). Clive Hart's Structure and Motif in "Finnegans Wake" is both exemplary and inordinately influential for this narrative insistence. Central to Hart's proposal is that the shorter units of Joyce's text yield larger recognizable and repeatable constituent blocks.
The large cyclic blocks of the constituent material are both clearly defined and predictable, but the smaller the structural units we consider, the more difficult it is to know how they will function (Hart, 65).
The brief qualifying and elaborating phrases have become Joyce's fundamental units, and in the long run they are usually more important for the sense than is the skeletal meaning of the sentence to which they were annexed (Hart, 41).
Apperceived patterns accumulate and fuse together out of lexical chaos; and thus the critic's task is reduced to an explication of the tension of articulation between tenebrous passages and comprehensible macro-text. Hart essentially established a hermeneutic faith that Finnegans Wake is a readable book despite of-or even because of-the unreadability of individual passages. This paradigm of readability has been programmatic for Wake studies ever since. The world according to Hart is a narratological nightmare from which Joyce studies has not yet escaped; Finnegans Wake is still read as if it were Ulyssean.
In essence this paradigm of Wakean criticism reified by Hart involves articulating passages into a typically narrativized totalizing and totalized structure, which has usually been defined as some modulation of a family-drama with a tendency to a universalizable network of allegories. This type of structuration is a narrative move par excellence precisely because it determines meaning through a moment of closure that defines and delimits the text. The text is surrendered to a teleology without a specific telos: a transcendent structuring moment of definitude. A favorite such structuring moment--and Hart is here typical--is Vico's cyclic history--or "vicociclometer" (FW: 614.27)--through which the meanings of both isolated passages and the book-as-a-whole are determined by "wheels spinning even faster within wheels as the whole major cycle turns, with no particular centre, from the first page to the last and back again to the beginning" (Hart, 45). In the application of this Vichian scheme, the absence of a specific telos functions as a defining teleologics for the text. Recent work on Joyce and Vico--by John Bishop and others--has tended to deemphasize the "vicociclometer" in favor of Vico's broader contributions to Wakean language. The critical presupposition behind any notion of structuration is that Wakean passages can be articulated under the auspices of such a teleological moment, and thus that there is an underlying logic and logistics to the text.