Customer Reviews

Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake (Mark H Ingraham Prize)

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The ultimate treatment of Joyce's confusing classic, Bishop's comprehensive analysis goes beyond typical literary interpretations. Focusing of such diverse influences as Vico's "New Science" and The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Bishop shows the compexity of Joyce, as well as his almost total command of the English language, and language in general. If you've ever wondered about Vico's historical thesis, and want to understand how Vico permeates Joyce, this is the book to read. In the end, you'll come away with a better appreciation of Joyce's text, and a feeling of amazement at Vico's poorly understood, but far-sighted view of mankind.

This is the best book I've found to serve as a companion on a descent into the depths of "Finnegans Wake." It will deepen a reader's understanding of Joyce's methods. The author's insights are original and exciting - unlike some other books, this one actually made me eager to jump back into Joyce's book, sure I would see things in a new light.

I'm coming close to completing my first reading of the Wake. I understand now that it's a book you need to read many times. For this first pass, though, Joseph Campbell's "Skeleton Key" and this "Book of the Dark" were great guides.

This guy's read "Finnegans Wake" a thousand times, so it seems, and his knowledge of Joyce and environs is wide. I'd recommend "Joyce's Book of the Dark" for you Wakeans out there who need to dig deeper into the book of the delpth.

Unlike any other book in English literature, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) is written entirely on the level of dream consciousness. Joycean scholar John Bishop has tightly focused his attention solely on the *dream* and *sleep* aspects of Finnegans Wake. While this makes for a rather monochromatic presentation sometimes bordering the banal, the scholarship, clarity, and thrust of Bishop's presentation are indisputable. There's so much depth and breadth in Finnegans Wake that Bishop's restrained scholarship is required to understand just this one aspect of it.

From Bishop's text, pages 4-7: "Suppose we charged ourselves with the task of providing in chronological order a detailed account of everything that occurred to us NOT last night ... but in the first half-hour of last night's sleep. The 'hole affair' [535.20], (and a 'hole', unlike a 'whole', has no content), will likely summon up a sustained 'blank memory' [515.33]: 'You wouldn't should as youd remesner, I hypnot' [360.23-24]. What would become equally obscure, even questionable, is the stability of identity... No one remembers the experience of sleep at all as a sequence of events linked chronologically in time by cause and effect."

Joyce remarked to his friend William Bird: "About my new work - do you know, Bird, I confess I can't understand some of my critics, like Pound or Miss Weaver, for instance. They say it's *obscure*. They compare it, of course, with Ulysses. But the action of Ulysses was chiefly in the daytime, and the action of my new work takes place chiefly at night. It's natural things should not be so clear at night, isn't it now?"

Bishop's book is superb scholarship and a major key to understanding the dream and sleep aspects of Finnegans Wake.