50 Book Pledge #15: James Joyce—Finnegans Wake

Regular readers might remember my original plans to offer regular updates on my trek through Joyce's final and most abstruse work, Finnegans Wake. But as soon as I set to work on that, the book dove so deeply into incomprehensibility that to even attempt to summarize what I'd read would consist of nothing more than Skeleton Key summaries. Unlike Ulysses, with its connected but distinct chapters offering unique perspectives and pleasures at every turn, the Wake varied as its sections are, flow together with such abandon that I got nowhere trying to parse individual elements of the book/

It was only when I stopped trying to get a handle on the book, to even get a basic footing of where I was, that I even began to get into the Wake. Around that time, however, the book started to make some kind of sense. Based around Viconian cycles, the Wake is, narratively speaking, easy to figure out. After all, Joyce repeats the story ad nauseam, of the protagonist's social rise and subsequent fall from grace over a lewd encounter in a park and his irrepressible guilt. The same characters appear to reenact the basics over and over, each time as new figures with new, gnarlier paths to the same outlet. And in HCE's all-pervasive sense of guilt is the guilt of Ireland past and present, an anthropomorphic realization of the suffocating cloud of Catholicism that hovers over Joyce's ex-pat recreation of his homeland. The only deliverance comes through the water form of HCE's wife, ALP, whose mysterious letter has the power to wash away her husband's sins (or her husband entirely). But ALP, like Joyce's best women characters—Molly Bloom, Gretta Conroy—exists outside her husband's hopeless encasement in Ireland's moral carbon monoxide. ALP's chapter, filled with river names and the constant burbling of water imagery, is perhaps the most poetic, liberated passage Joyce ever wrote.

Finnegans Wake: Book I, Chapters 1-4

From the very first page of Finnegans Wake, I knew I was in for a rough ride. Beginning in the middle of a sentence that will eventually be completed by the other fragment closing the book, the Wake plunges into a dense mire of language that collides various tongues into an idioglossia of puns and references so obscure as to be their own words, a sort of twin-speak warping of Dublin's geographical makeup that makes the esoteric written atlas provided by Ulysses seem as easy to read as a star map.

It's heady stuff, a gnarled (if flowing) run of portmanteaux and wordplay that seems to delight in instantly alienating the audience. The first chapter (and the next three) read like the Oxen of the Sun chapter of Ulysses, that book's most challenging, obscurant part. With fewer resources handy for the first-time reader than I had for Ulysses, Finnegans Wake proved an instant struggle. It took hours, whole hours, to read even one chapter.

Reading Diary: Finnegans Wake

Reading Log


Book I, Ch. 1-4

I had not planned on keeping a running journal of my reading of Finnegans Wake, James Joyce's final, most elaborate opus, the way I did for Ulysses. However, as I begin to struggle—and I mean struggle—with the Wake, I figure it might do me good to keep a record of my thoughts in some vain attempt to organize what little I've managed to eke out of it so far. It may well be that this journal comes to resemble Robert Falcon Scott's Arctic diary, but damn it I need to do all I can to even start with this book.

I imagine I'll write posts by chapter as I did for Ulysses, though my first entry might consist of the first four chapters as I don't know that I've understood enough of any one of them to have enough thoughts for individual articles. I am slowly, ever so slowly, getting into the rhythm of the novel, even laughing aloud at times, and I plan on getting the famous Skeleton Key companion to give me a bit of a boost in understanding the basics. Worry not, Joyceans: I am not so foolish as to try to "get" Finnegans Wake. But as with Ulysses, I need a more solid foundation before I can slip into Joyce's nocturnal, panlingual orgy of shifting foci and character names and his free-associative wordplay. Still, despite my occasional flashes of pure, seething rage at the impossible density, I am curiously drawn to each page, rereading passages not merely out of necessity but because I can sense the music in them calling even to a tone-deaf id-jeeot like me. As much as I grapple with each page and eventually move on clueless as ever, I have the vague notion that, should I ever make it out to the other end, I'll be a devoted fan. But I suppose we'll see, won't we?