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

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"Finnegan's Wake" is perhaps the most difficult and wilfully obscure piece in all of modern literature, a book written in polyglottal puns that continues to baffle not only lay readers but, in large part, Joyceans as well. Here in 12 chapters, John Bishop aims to unravel Joyce's obscurities and aims to reveal the "Wake" more clearly than anyone has done before. The greatest obstacle to the comprehension of "Finnegan's Wake", says Bishop, is the failure to believe that Joyce really meant what he said when he spoke of the book as being a reconstruction of the nocturnal life. As a consequence, readers have scrutinized the text with an unyielding literalism bent on finding a kind of meaning in every way antithetical to the kind of meaning embodied in dreams. Had Joyce made the "Wake" less obscure, says Bishop, he would have annihilated everything about the book that is most essential, most engaging, funny, and most profound. In taking seriously Joyce's stated intention of writing a book about the night, Bishop shows how the determination to represent nocturnal experience accounts for the form, shape, direction, and language of "Finnegan's Wake". Although Bishop is not the first to appreciate the problems Joyce faced in his reconstruction of the night, no one has demonstrated more clearly and persuasively how Joyce's creative imagination solved those problems, nor made a more convincing case for the profound significance of Joyce's effort. Bishop relates the "Wake" to Freud, to Vico, and to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, shedding light throughout on such fundamental and complex subjects as dream theory and interpretation; thanatology; optics and phonetics; infancy, embryology, and gender; and sexuality and power.

Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press (June 15, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0299108244
• ISBN-13: 978-0299108243
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #88,248 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For Joyce fanatics -- so deep it's mindboggling, December 13, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake (Hardcover)

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.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the top 5 books on "Finnegans Wake", January 25, 2000

By A Customer

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.

22 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Nothing will ever make Finnegans Wake not obscure.", August 8, 2000

By	John McConnell (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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 on the *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. At bottom, one really doesn't like to admit there's so much in Finnegans Wake that such restrained scholarship is required to understand just one aspect of it. But then again, this work was the mature James Joyce's magnum opus.

From the 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?"

Superb scholarship and a major key to understanding the deep strata of Finnegans Wake.