Finnegans Wake Book

Finnegans Wake is Joyce's masterpiece, the culmination of his life's work, the apex of his art, the tremendous final achievement of the 20th century's greatest prose stylist. To ignore Joyce's masterpiece is to miss out on one of a handful of great events in literary history. Dubliners anticipated A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A Portrait of the Artist… anticipated Ulysses, Ulysses anticipated Finnegans Wake. Joyce's individual works are particularly momentous set side by side, as the trajectory of his craft's transfiguration can be clearly traced. For Joyce, all roads led to the Wake. We cannot consider the snow "faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead", we cannot consider "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo", we cannot consider "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed", without considering "A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." To accept Joyce's place in the history of literature is to accept Finnegans Wake as his greatest contribution. To ignore or dismiss it is to leave a gaping hole in your understanding of the progress of literary aesthetics in the modern age. As William Gass said: "FW is the high-water mark of Modernism, and not to have been fundamentally influenced by it as a writer is not to have lived in your time. Not to live in your time is a serious moral flaw."

Finnegans Wake, at first blush, might seem the most uninviting literary relic imaginable. It begins in the middle of a fragment of a sentence and immediately immerses the reader in a floodtide of its Wakelanguage without any ado- no lamp, lantern, or quickflickering guidepost torches to ease one's way in and through. And, to be sure, this is a very difficult book, perhaps the most difficult book you or I will ever read. But let me here briefly comment on what the Wake is not: it is not gibberish, it is not "the product of a diseased mind", it is not "an elaborate prank" to make fools of readers and academia. To be a proponent of any of these claims is to have not spent time with the text. It is to not trust that Joyce, after having perfected and exhausted the potentialities of the form of the novel with Ulysses, was capable of going beyond that achievement, to forge for himself and for us an utterly new way- to push the idea of the novel, and the language of the novel, past itself and into a new mode or form. What more would one person have to accomplish than write Ulysses to earn an audience's confidence? Finnegans Wake is not only not unreadababble, it is perhaps the most carefully, minutely, complexly composed work of art the modern era has produced. A third of Joyce's life was spent rendering the Wake into the form in which we have it now. Might we, as readers, not allow ourselves to be a fraction of a percent as generous with our time, to try to understand what he was attempting, on his terms?

Enough of what the Wake isn't, on to what it is. First of all, it is music. Second, it is an experimental prose work, a work whose form and content are one and the same, where there is no boundary between style and substance. Thirdly and onward, it is an occurrence of language. It is a vast palimpsest, a layering and weaving of etyms. It is the realization and perfection of the work of static art that Joyce was approaching his entire career- art, literature, that does not progress from point to point as in traditional narrative, but exists and is experienced in cycles, circles, reverberations, (re)generations, iterations, emergences, divested of the encumbrances of space and time. It is Flaubert's ideal "book about nothing."* It is the density and obscurity of night rendered into waterfall rainbow river language. "A permanent member of the avant-garde." "An unpopularizable book." A great riddle or maze. An amalgamation of gods. Obscure pun-drenched birdtongue, strangest little song you'll ever damn hear. Hen scratchings on the magazine wall, typographically rendered, a polyvocal defence of the great shame and guilt of man. The tonguetwister of allhumanity dreamingwaking together, it was uncovered in a burial mound. Vico's four horsemen of the arkpokalypse. Mamalujo broadcasting from the hill of Shaun and a donkey brayayaying over radio waves intercepted telling strange advertisements out of Carthage and burning Roam. It is the Egyptian Book of the Dead within the Book of Kells within the Old Testament and the New within Dante and Shakespeare and Milton and Goethe and Swift et Sterne et al. and Wilde's trial to boot. It is a motley chorus composed of all of Ireland's saints and sinners. "Then's now with now's then in tense continuant. Heard." It is Finn MacCool's salmon flitting in the deep well and Tristan and Isolde's marriage ship sailing out under the cry of gulls (forewaves whisping whshhpwshpshp) and at the same time it is their opera made prose, mild und leise. It is the excrement ink writ on the foolscap flesh of Shem the Penman, thus it is Shemdean spawn. It is Anna Livia Plurabelle's missive to the antagonistic greater world of chitterchattererflitterflatterers (how loathe they have become to me!) and little Issy star cloud sister's spilled milk across the great nightspan, bababbling brooks about the laying mountainous mass of sleepman. Treacling trickling trickster tome, laplapping gossip and news, soundbites and screams and dieatribes from Lucifer's caindom, enabler of murtherer, and also song of the cockcrowcoolicolala! Noman's humming in the valley of the wal. Shaft of light pierce o'reillying the mourning mist. A confuscation of mystification by utteration and ululation with confabulation and iteration of vocalization of a Wake in Preegress! Hush! Caution! Echoland! What a funferall! The last lief on the stonetree. "The untireties of livesliving being the one substrance of a streamsbecoming. Totalled in toldteld and teldtold in tittletell tattle." Mind your hats goan in!

Lastly, Finnegans Wake is the least pessimistic book I know. After one has accustomed oneself to the night language, after one is acquainted with Joyce's modes and methods, this book is pure joy. One begins to anticipate the moments and emergence of themes, iterations of characters in different guises, developments and repetitions of rhythms, word and sound groupings that recur in exact placement, much as one listens to a beloved symphony or opera. The music of the Wake, like a true Irish wake, is a rejoicing at the deathbed, rounds of songs rollicking the departed soul into the next cycle of existence. What is more optimistic than Joyce's interpretation of Vico's historical cycles? That as we approach our non-being the clock resets, time ticks ahead again for us among the shades of history, the sun rises as it always will, the night dissipates, the fog of this dream-life clears and mankind emerges again, to suffer it all, sing it all, weep through it all, live it all again. That these ages resound again and again not through great men only but through everyman, that the resurrection of the meaning of man comes in the simplest of assemblages- husband, wife, son, daughter. This affirmation is a mainstay throughout all of Joyce's work- that the universal erupts through the banal, that the commonplace is the point where the cosmos enacts its drama. What could be a more joyous celebration and confirmation, not only of human life as it emerges from the darkness of meaninglessness in the only possible way it can, through language, but of the creative life in particular, the life whose purpose is to make new forms out of the fragments of the old, to anticipate the new, to instill a beautiful renewal of purpose for each emerging epoch, that it might know its own language, make its own music?

Nathan's review is a fount of information, please do visit the museyroom. Tip!

And if you are abcedminded, when you set out on your own reeding of the Wake, please to be joining and contributing to the Wake Grappa. We're all of us over there at different points on the turning of the widening gyre, so feel free to hop on at any time.

*The entire plot of Finnegans Wake can be summed up essentially in that classic cliched opening phrase "It was a dark and stormy night…"