This month features James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Penguin Modern Classics, ISBN 014118311X, £8.99 |
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So far, in writing these columns, I have been scrupulous (trust me) in reading every single word of the books I’ve written about. With Finnegans Wake I’m going to be quite open with you: I’ve only reached page 495 (out of 628).
But I don’t feel any shame in this, because Finnegans Wake is not a book that anyone, once they’ve begun, ever finishes reading. Finnegan-begin-again, and it does – the final page ends ‘A way a long a last a love along the’ and the first page beings ‘riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,…’
Joyce based the form of the book on the mythlike philosophy of Giambattista Vico, who said that all history followed a rise and fall through a cycle of four periods, the end of the last of which is the beginning of the first. And Joyce took his title (and much more) from an Irish song in which Finnegan, thought to be dead, resurrects in the middle of his own wake – fall and rise. It’s not a funeral, you see, it’s a fun-for-all, or as Joyce puts it, a funferal. Only, up until now, not a great many readers, at any one time, have found it all that much fun – and I don’t think this situation is likely to change.
If the date pencilled in the front of my copy is correct, I began reading Finnegans Wake in 1989 – which was my last year at university. I had already read Joyce’s lyric poems, his short storybook Dubliners; I had read and loved and hated and written essays about Ulysses. Finnegans Wake, though, completely baffled and bored and annoyed and defeated me.
This was mainly because I made the decision, early to, to read it completely without the aid of critics and their cribs. In this, I was being very foolish – it’s a bit like deciding you want to climb Everest but that to use ropes would be cheating.
As the very useful American website www.finneganswake.org says, ‘Most people are not able to read the Wake alone – unless truly heroic or from another planet.’ It goes on to counter my main anxiety about cribbing, that my reading of Ulysses had been polluted by the opinions of other readers, and that I didn’t want the same thing to happen with Finnegans Wake. ‘Most critics who have written on the Wake have thought long and hard and one should take full advantage of their labors. We do not worry that we will be corrupted; we invariably disagree with everyone but, at least, we have interpretations to stimultate our own…’
And so, a couple of months ago, I decided to stop being an isolationist reader and accept the help of the living and the dead. This has brought me a greater overall understanding of the book, but has not in any way damaged what I think of as the greatest early pleasure of Finnegans Wake – the pleasure of being completely lost in the page, bewildered by the words; of not, for once in a very long while, knowing what in Heaven’s name is going on.
‘Lowly, longly, a wail went forth. Pure Yawn lay low. On the mead of the hillock lay, heartsoul dormant mid shadowed landshape, brief wallet to his side, and arm loose, by his staff of citron briar, tradition stick-pass-on. His dream monologue was over, of cause, but his drama parapolylogic had yet to be, affact.’
The sense becomes clear, with a little thought; and the beauty is clear right from the start.
James Joyce is a famously ‘difficult’ writer (though the difficulty of Ulysses is much exaggerated), and if you’re going to attempt to read Finnegans Wake don’t give yourself a hard time for putting it aside for a few years, swearing it’s not worth it. It is worth it; it’ll still be there at the end of those years. It has instant pleasures but isn’t, overall, anything other than a very long game – longer than your life. If that scares you, it’s not your book at all.
Finnegans Wake is a dreambook, a counterpart to the daybook that was Ulysses. In it (and this is my roughest sketch), the first few numerals are characterized. There is the 1, which is the book, the city (Dublin), the history, and also the daughter, Isabel. There is the 2, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and Anna Livia Plurabelle, a man and woman, a mother and father, a husband and wife, but also a mountain and a river, a thing and a hole, a fastness and a flow. There is the second 2, Shem and Shaun, twin sons of the first 2, a fictionalist and a fantasist, an alter-ego and an anti-ego. There is the 3, which I’m not sure about at all. And there is the 4, who can be any four you care to mention, from the elements to the Gospel-writers Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. There is also a story, of sorts, although a very buried one, involving HCE’s guilt at an act committed in the past.
All of this, though, in a sense, comes later. To enjoy Finnegans Wake you first have to accept that you will never gain anything approaching total knowledge of it. Even a working knowledge takes a while to come by, though the critical cribs will help. But it’s the fault of too many books, particularly these days, that they are entirely transparent, holding nothing back for a second, third or fourth let alone an imagined hundredth reading.
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