We all know exactly the day on which Leopold Bloom undertook his famous Odyssey around the city streets. More esoteric, however, is the date of Finnegans Wake. According to John Gordon, author of Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary, the internal evidence fixes it conclusively on Monday, March 21st, 1938, and the action continues into Tuesday, March 22nd; Joyce's masterpiece, it seems, is a product of the vernal equinox. Of more interest to meteorologists, however, is the importance of weather to the narrative.
The weather of Finnegans Wake is entirely consistent with a March setting. It is volatile and changeable, with cold, wet and blustery conditions on the Monday, running a full meteorological gamut all the way from fog to hail, and then fine on Tuesday. Indeed, part of Gordon's thesis is that in Finnegans Wake the March weather is a paradigm for Irish weather throughout the year.
Most of Monday is miserable: "the wetter is pest" we hear, but by six in the evening "the rennes are overt", and it has cleared up sufficiently for the washerwomen to do their laundry in the open. But even then, again "der went is rising". Before midnight, rain and wind lash the outside shutters, and a shower of hailstones rattles on the dreamer's window. Later again, however, the rain has stopped and left a mist to show a fogbow, and Shaun can catch occasional glimpses of the moon as it appears and disappears behind the clouds. Eventually, the dawn breaks on what will be a beautiful, clear day.
Of all these images, that of the storm is by far the most evocative. A wind from the north-east is caused by a depression which had formed in Scandinavia, and which has made its way westwards through St George's Channel. It is heralded by fog signals, dense cloud, and all kinds of precipitation including local drizzle - and the "welter focussed" has been very accurate:
"Wind from the nordth. Warmer towards muffinbell, Lull. As our revelant Colunnfiller predicted in last mount's chattiry sermon, the all expected depression over Schiumdinebbia, a bygger muster of veirying precipitation and haralded by faugh sicknells, (hear kokkenhovens ekstras!) and unwalloped in an unusuable suite of clouds, having filthered through the middelhav of the same gorgers' kennel on its wage wealthwards and incursioned a sotten retch of low pleasure, missed in some parts but with lucal drizzles, the outlook for tomarry (Streamstress Mandig) beamed brider, his ability good."
And at its climax, this storm hurls a tree through the dreamer's casement with a thunderword: "Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonneronntuonnthunn trovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthutnuk!" The hostile world outside has broken in.