Finnegans Wake (by James Joyce)

Fuck yeah!

(Er, more later. Is it too early to open some champagne?)

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson)

My hat is absolutely off to these two, the first to really extract a throughline from a book that is, at first glance*, utterly incomprehensible. I still have no idea how they did it. When I was reading their framework and then turning to the applicable passage in the book, I could sometimes barely extract a word or a phrase that enabled me to say, "Oh yes, that's where they got that."

(*I typed "at first glass" which is so totally Joycean; I will have to save that for a poem.)

I think Joyce himself did a lot of explaining, when the Wake was published, about the characters (which is how you know HCE and ALP's real names, which aren't even in the book anywhere with 100 percent accuracy as far as I remember) and about his sigla (the symbols that signify the characters in their various forms, which, again, are not in the book for the most part). That's the most frustrating thing about Joyce; would it have killed him to include some of this incredibly vital information IN THE TEXT ITSELF? Like the chapter titles in Ulysses. Sometimes it's like he wants to remove any possibility of comprehension, and that seems like needless ego.

Anyway, I read a critic somewhere or other who said that the Skeleton Key is reductive in the worst way, that it's the lowest common denominator version of Finnegans Wake that does a disservice to people who read it. That's ridiculous, really. First of all, anyone intelligent enough to read the Skeleton Key (which is in itself not easy) and make it through the Wake will obviously see that there's far more in the text than the Key can possibly cover. But it's absolutely essential (at least it was for me) to know which characters turn into which other characters, the basics of what's happening, who's talking, and what it all means.

However, it certainly doesn't negate any of the other interpretations of the book. This critic seems to think readers will swallow the Key whole and cease to think for themselves, but that's ludicrous. I have a great example from today, where the Key translates "...little eggons, youlk and meelk, in a farbiger pancosmos. With a hottyhammyum all round." into "ham and eggs for all." Of course that's reductive, and it has to be, or else the Key would be twelve times as long as the Wake. But I enjoyed extracting my own meaning from the text; for instance, I took "little eggons, youlk and meelk" to mean that our lives ("you" and "me") are "little eons." And I'm sure you can read a hundred other things into those two short sentences.

So, my point is, thank god for the Skeleton Key, because without it, I wouldn't have been able to read Finnegans Wake at all. Obviously it was a starting point in Joyce scholarship, and I take it in that light. I look forward to reading more recent scholarship, but I tip my hat once again to the men who gave critics everywhere a place to start.

Page 601

I don't want to get too confident, here, but I'm on page 611 and there are only 628 pages in the book. I think I might even finish it tomorrow (three days to spare)! I have to say, though, I felt incredibly obtuse today.

I'm reading the final part of the book, and it is basically the ending/beginning of the cycle. Just for a bit of background, the book is essentially about cycles. (You may know that the book ends in the middle of a sentence, and the book opens with the end of that sentence, so the whole book is a big cycle.) In this part of the book, part four, the cycle has ended--but at the same time is about to begin. (There are references to Vishnu, who is dreaming, and whose dream is the universe, which ties in so beautifully with dreams, another huge theme of the book.) In addition to the theme of cycles and dreams, the book has countless examples of places where there are layers upon layers upon layers of meaning, often in just a single word or portmanteau word.

So knowing both of these things, and basically understanding them for the past 600 pages (and full year of reading) you will know why I felt kind of dense when I realized that the "wake" in Finnegans Wake is not only the awakening of the book's dreamer (in some interpretations) and the vigil that is alluded to in the song ("lots of fun at Finnegan's Wake"), but also refers to the events of the book taking place IN THE WAKE of Finnegan, who is the primordial father figure. Since everything has already happened and is about to happen, it all comes in the wake of Finnegans fall, which is man's primitive fall, etc. etc.

Okay, typing this out, I don't know if it makes any sense at all. But trust me, I should have figured this out about 550 pages ago.

99.5

Last night I achieved a milestone in Finnegans Wake: I reached the halfway point!

The halfway mark (page 314) is right after the Study Hour chapter and a short way into the Tavern chapter. The Study Hour chapter is supposed to be the most difficult one in the book, although the Tavern chapter is the longest.

Study Hour was difficult, even by Wakean standards. It had the main body of the text (which is, obviously, difficult as ever) in addition to notes in the right hand margin (in one voice), notes in the left hand margin (in a different voice), and footnotes (in a third voice, or possibly one of the first two voices). There are also drawings. And throw in the Skeleton Key and its explanations with its own footnotes, and you've got a complicated reading experience. (Here is a sample page.)

Fun, though! The Study Hour chapter is fabulous at the end, when Dolph starts doing the geometry problem for Kev, and it gets all tied into the Kabbalah at the end, and the whole of human history (Prometheus = Santa Claus; the list of associations begins here with "Cato" in the margin equaling "Duty, the daughter of discipline" and continuing on--you can actually read this section, I promise!). It actually flows pretty well; although I definitely needed the Key to explain the Kabbalah stuff (the numbers 1-9 and 10, very interesting), the history stuff was fairly self-explanatory. And once you realize that the geometry problem is about ALP (the mother) and there is some Oedipal stuff happening in there, it clarifies a lot.

I think I am definitely, firmly in the camp of enjoying the book. Believe it or not, it was hard to stop reading and go to bed last night (even though I spent an hour and a half reading probably 15 pages, and it was midnight). I kept wanting to take notes in the margins on everything that I figured out. I am getting way, way better at figuring out what the hell is going on, by the way.

And also, this chapter mentioned the philosopher's stone (on the page I linked; it's the "lapis, Vieus Von DVbLIn") and has the word "hogwarts" in it. Which, having Potter fever as I do, I thought was funny.

A Word in Your Ear: How & Why to Read James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (by Eric Rosenbloom)

I'm getting really into reading Finnegans Wake; the more I read it, the more I am interested in understanding it. (My finest moment was the other night, when I translated an entire incomprehensible sentence about "esoupcans" without using any sources at all. I don't have the sentence in front of me, but once I connected "esoupcans" with "europeans," the sentence made sense to me. It was sexy.)

Anyway I've been looking up books that help illuminate the text and in my search, I ended up reading the first edition of this book, which I found as a PDF online. It is uneven and lacks a certain academic rigor; on the other hand, it has many worthwhile tidbits worth noting for posterity. I will now note some of them:

• On the idea that Finnegans Wake is a dream: the opening word of the novel, "riverrun," suggests the French "reverons," meaning, "we will dream." Cool, huh?
  
• "explications of Finnegans Wake are often more arcane than the text itself" (true, very true)
  
• There is a critical theory that ALP is in reality a widow of a man executed after the 1916 Easter uprising. The hanging scaffold is the scaffold Tim Finnegan is building. (I don't think the book has an easy solution like this, or that it can be solved, even, but it's interesting.)
  
• Phoenix Park (the site of HCE's crime, of Humpty Dumpty's wall, and of Finnegans scaffold) is Eden, "where the fall into knowledge is enacted nightly."
  
• "The challenge of reading is not to see through the veil of printed words to something hidden but to transubstantiate them as symbols back to originating thought." Oooh. Deep.
  

I loved the author's symbol language that shows how characters morph from one into the other. He also connected each of the characters to characters in the myth of Osiris and in the Tristan and Isolde story (not an original theory by any means but an extremely illuminating one, and in this case, explained particularly well). Also includes "the shorter Finnegans Wake" (about ten sentences long, available online and charming) and various guides to reading.

Did this book blow my mind? Not really. But it offered more pieces to the puzzle. I can't imagine why anyone would want to follow in my footsteps at this point, but Finnegans Wake? Is really, really fun to try and figure out. Especially once you realize that Joyce isn't being random at all; that it all fits together; it all makes sense in a really frustrating, cool, brilliant way.

(And I've just realized that once I finish this book I am in danger of name dropping it in every conversation I ever have about literature, only I will refer to it as "the Wake" and be really pretentious and annoying. Crap.)

The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake: A Structuralist Analysis (by Margot Norris)

I know, I know. This is just ridiculous. Feel free to scroll down and read the other three entries I just posted and skip the rest of this. It's not going to make much sense anyway; it's all so complicated and there's no way could possibly synthezise it in a blog entry.

I bought this in a little used bookshop in St. Francisville. Then I read it on the plane, even though I was exhausted, it is really so fascinating, it was a breeze to read! And I have a lot to say about it! (I am about 200 pages into "the Wake" as Norris calls it. I loved the chapter about the washerwomen at the Ford. I felt like I was turning a corner. Reading this book was definitely a real corner-turning moment, though. I will tell you why.)

So first of all, Norris looks at the book from a structuralist standpoint, which basically boils down to a Freudian analysis. And since Finnegans Wake is supposed to be a dream, it makes sense to approach it that way. One thing she said that I found fascinating is that Portrait of the Artist correspondes to the Icarus myth, Ulysses to the Odyssey, and Finnegans Wake to the Oedipus myth. Which seems perfectly logical, and she makes a great case for her reading of the book. It's all symbolic, all about repression, and all about transgression across boundaries (such as the sexual family boundaries, in the Oedipal reading, which is persuasive in a lot of other ways too). But that's one reason why the book doesn't "make sense" and why it's so frustratingly encoded: because it's in the form of a dream. And the characters are ciphers, all standing in for each other and for historical figures, the way that everyone you encounter in a dream stands for someone else--and ultimately comes from your own unconscious. So they're all you.

Basically (and forgive me if I'm all over the place) Norris criticizes Campbell and Robinson (who wrote the Skeleton Key) for attempting to "decode" the book as if it were a novel. She asserts that it's impossible to do so fully, and that Joyce is trying to intentionally subvert the tradition of the novel, which relies on an individual viewpoint, in favor of the universal. Of course, Campbell and Robinson do definitely talk in terms of archetypes and such--the universality of it is completely undeniable. (And Joseph Campbell is Joseph Campbell.) But when reading the Skeleton Key I would find myself wondering why Joyce didn't just say what he wanted to say--now I'm understanding that there's so much repetition of themes because it's so obtuse--everything recurs and returns because he does actually want you to get it. And it's not straightforward because that would be defeating his entire purpose.

This was published in 1974, I think, so I'm really interested in finding out what's been done since then, now that I am starting to get a handle on the text.

The second part of Norris's book--the part I'm even more excited about--discusses what Joyce is doing with language, which allows (and I have definitely noticed this) words to mean several things at once, and sentences to mean one thing and then their opposite, simultaneously. She talks about portmanteau words and also the reader's instinct for creating meaning out of the sentence structure that Joyce provides. She claims that the book ends with an article ("the") in part because the articles hold the rest of Joyce's invented and conflated language together. And she gives all these examples of sentences that mean eight different things simultaneously and you can't help but respect Joyce's genius. He is so far from arbitrary. It's so purposeful and masterful and amazing. And I APPRECIATE IT for the first time, really. And now I am dying to teach a poetry workshop where the stuff Joyce does in the Wake is the jumping-off point. Because it's amazing.

I have all these quotes marked and I was going to type them up but it would take all day, probably. I loved all of her comparisons between this and Ulysses--they are both difficult, but you can follow Leopold Bloom around Dublin on his one specific day. You know Molly Bloom is not the same person as Josie Breen. Finnegans Wake is the opposite of that. HCE is himself, and Finnegan, and his sons, and Finn McCool. ALP is herself, and the hen, and the river Liffey, all equally. It's not that I wasn't paying close enough attention or not understanding enough... it's that there is no objective truth that is eluding me, because the elusiveness is the entire point.

Wow. Did I just start loving Finnegans Wake or what? Holy shit.

Book 100

I think Finnegans Wake might have broken me. I'm still on page 10. I know the idea is to let the words flow over me even if they don't make sense but... they don't make sense. That's seven hundred pages of nonsense. Can that be my review? Finnegans Wake is 700 pages worth of nonsense. The end.

I have read 99 of these books; I have suffered through Look Homeward, Angel and Atlas Shrugged. How can I give up now?

In the meantime, I have shifted focus over to the Time 100 list, since Ian seems to have many of those books on his shelf. I'm reading The Big Sleep right now, in fact. At least my entire reading project won't grind to a standstill as I struggle with this moral quandary about book number one hundred.