Finnegans Wake (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)

Upon first looking at the pages of "Finnegans Wake," one inevitably must wonder what it's supposed to be. My explanation of it is an extension of my theory about "Ulysses," which is that "Ulysses" was Joyce's effort to write a novel that used every single existing word in the English language, or at least as many as he could. (Among its 400,000 words, "Ulysses" certainly has a much broader lexicon than any other novel of comparable length.) Having exhausted all the possibilities of English in "Ulysses," he had only one recourse for his next project, which was to create an entirely new language as a pastiche of all the existing ones; the result is "Finnegans Wake."

The language in "Finnegans Wake" is a continuum of puns, portmanteaus, disfigured words, anagrams, and rare scraps of straightforward prose. What Joyce does is exploit the way words look and sound in order to associate them with remote, unrelated ideas. For example, his phrase "Olives, beets, kimmells, dollies" may sound familiar to those who happen to know that the first four letters of the Hebrew alphabet are aleph, bet, gimel, daled. "Psing a psalm of psexpeans, apocryphul of rhyme" recalls a nursery rhyme that may reside quietly in your most dormant memory cells, while "Where it is nobler in the main to supper than the boys and errors of outrager's virtue" sounds like a drunk auditioning for the role of Hamlet. Imaginary adjectives that pertain to letters of the English alphabet are employed to describe Dublin as a city "with a deltic origin and a nuinous end." "Finnegans Wake" is the ultimate in esoterica, and what you get out of it depends largely on your store of knowledge, so that upon completion, with a mutual wink at Joyce, you congratulate yourself for being so clever.

The text is supposed to reflect a dream or a dreamlike state, an imperfect rendering of hazily remembered pictures and thoughts, but it also evokes the multivocal babble one might hear in a crowded Irish pub, multiple rolling streams of lilting brogue-laden speech combining into a sort of rhythmic cacophony, a variegated procession of verbal images ranging from the mundane to the fantastical. It cannot be read in any conventional manner of reading prose; each sentence has a melody, and the words must be vocalized in the mind to hear the verbal music. It can be maddening if you try to make meaning of it all, but if you're familiar with Joyce's past work, you've already risked your sanity adequately to make it through "Finnegans Wake."

It took me five years to read finnegan's wake, on and off. It is probably the hardest book to read in the English language (I won't go into Joyce's use of German, French, Latin, Hebrew, etc.)

But why is it worth it? What makes Finnegan's wake different from utter nonsense? A LOT. Many readers complain that they can only understand two or three points every page. True for me as well. But when I checked, the obscure points of the seemingly meaningless sentences *always* had some deeper meaning.

For example, let us start with the title: "Finnegans wake" (the apostrophe that appears in many editions is a mistake.) There is at least a triple meaning: "Finnegan's wake", the wake of the mystical hero; "finnegans wake" - the Irish are waking up; and "fin-again wake" - showing the cyclical nature of the dream history of this book.

Or take the year, 1132, that appears in the book quite a lot (sometimes in the guise of 566, which is 1132/2). It symbolizes the the circularity of history (11=10+1, starting to count again after reaching 10) and the fall of empires (bodies fall at 32 ft/sec^2).

Or take the case of the dreamer's son, who falls from the sky as "a bare godkin". It is both a description of his condition (a naked son of God) and a pun on Hamlet's "a bare bodkin" (an unsheated dagger.)

These are just three examples. But this is where Joyce's genius is - and the enjoyment of the book is. It's just plain fun to figure these things out - and when you *do* figure them out, the real meaning of the text, and the story, begins to show.

It's hard work, but it's worth it.

1) Yes, some people have finished this book. I have, and so have several people I know.

2) Some people enjoy this book. (see above).

3) It isn't just self-indulgence by academics. For example: a Professor of English Literature at Oxford University has said that it's not worth reading. Lots of academics have. These are people who 'know everything' for a job. Can you imagine how much FW annoys them?

4) It's hard. Yes, that's right, hard. But hard can be fun. Just like sex. (FW does take longer though).

5) The reason why lovers of Joyce sound so passionate about it is that they genuinely feel that way. For real. Imagine you'd fallen in love and noone around you had a clue what it felt like. You'd want to shake them and tell them.

6) It makes sense. To fully understand it (if that's possible) would take generations of study. But i) If you're reading for pleasure, not ego kicks, surely how much you get out matters more than what proportion of the book's meaning you can lay claim to, ii) like life, reading FW is made up of lots of small pleasures and ii) Lighten up!! It's funny! Anyway, when was the last time you 'fully' understood a book?

It's easy to see why the great majority of people would decide that they had other priorities. I respect that opinion. But please don't fling insults at a book that some of us love. Yes, love. Reading FW was a high-point of my life. Emotion and excitement: anger, frustration, joy, humour, delight, even boredom. Deep relationships are difficult. They hurt. And they make us more alive.