To me it’s not only the greatest novel ever written, it’s the greatest poem ever written, the greatest detective story ever written, and the most entertaining work in all literature, and as William York Tindall of Columbia says, it’s the funniest and dirtiest book in the world. People are intimidated by it. If the publishers just had the sense to put on the cover, “the funniest and dirtiest book in the world - Tindall, Columbia”, it would sell a lot better, and people would make the effort to decipher it.
- Robert Anton Wilson on Finnegans Wake.
Thursday marks Bloomsday, the annual celebration of Irish author James Joyce and his works.
On June 16, 1904, Joyce and Nora Barnacle first went for the walk through Dublin he later immortalized in Ulysses. I thought I’d try some Joyce-related reading in the days leading up to Bloomsday.
I got through some of Dubliners years ago in college, but Ulysses, according to Martin Amis, can “take a week to read, if you do nothing else.” No deal: a project like that would cut into my reading. If I was going to be defeated by a Joyce tome, I perversely figured, it might as well be the heavyweight: Finnegans Wake.
So I prepared with a bit of Joyce scholarship. Published in 1939 by a reluctant T. S Eliot — himself no slouch in the obscure reference department — Finnegans Wake supposedly remains the most famously inaccessible literary work in English. Amis describes Joyce ratcheting up the difficulty, from Dubliners to Ulysses, before he “girds himself for the ultimately reader-hostile, reader-nuking immolation of Finnegans Wake, where every word is a multilingual pun.”
Joyce apparently assembled FW with 12,000 notes left over from Ulysses. The central character of FW is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, or Here Comes Everybody, or Haveth Childers Everywhere. It’s that Everyman thing, and his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle, is Everywoman. Her name also connotes the River Liffey that runs through Dublin, as well as rain, the life force and damn near anything else you can identify with a liberal arts decoding ring.
Sounded daunting. Too daunting. So I figured I’d take FW like a potent medicine, a few pages a day. And I did just that, with a battered Penguin classics copy, and some outside help (Amis and company).
So there I was in a North Vancouver coffee shop, with my laptop and the Penguin. Jacked up on two Americanos and ready for anything the author could throw at me, I cracked open Joyce’s cryptobrick.
“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.”
Interesting opening sentence, with the river’s flow mirrored in the structure of the sentence itself. I could tell that even without knowing what a “vicus” is. But I’m afraid it was downhill from there:
“Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passen- core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time . . .
And that’s only halfway through the sentence. As I flipped through the book, I could see little in the way of anything my understanding could land on. It was Greek to me, literally: Joyce apparently incorporated something like 40 languages in his multilingual puns. I didn’t need CliffsNotes for FW — I needed simultaneous translation from the UN.
According to Joyce scholars, the book is, at least in part, the story of HCE, his wife and their three children: both the primal family of human origins and Everyfamily. Underlying the wordplay is a central idea, inspired by the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, that history is cyclic. Joyce demonstrated this in beginning the book with the end of a sentence left unfinished on the last page. And the first word to puzzle me — vicus — is a distortion of Vico’s name.
But I wanted the thoughts of someone other than a Joyce scholar. Knowing of no one who’s ever tackled FW before, I logged onto Amazon.com, to check out other readers’ reactions.
“I still understand enough to know that I like what I’m reading,” writes a self-described 17-year-old high school senior. “And even when I don’t understand, it doesn’t matter. Simply the sound of the language is enjoyable. ‘As we there are where are we are we there from tomtittot to teetootomtotalitarian. Tea tea too oo.’ What the hell does that mean? Who knows! But it doesn’t matter, it rocks!”
Well, if a high-school kid could get this much out of FW, surely I could too. The next morning I cracked open the Penguin as soon as I awoke, to have at the first page again without even the benefit of caffeine.
“The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy.”
I tossed the Penguin to the floor.
Perhaps Joyce was going for some watery onomatopoeia with that “bababada” bit, but I couldn’t be sure. Is this the music of the spheres, or the sound of one mick wanking? Even the experts aren’t so sure. Daniel J. Boorstin, formerly the Librarian of Congress, put it this way in The Creators: “Why has so eloquent and lucid a writer as Joyce spent his energies teasing us with a book of colossal proportions, with its puzzling plenitude of invented words, multiple puns and onomatopoetic inventions? Is it inconceivable that this master of the comic may have launched the biggest literary hoax of history?”
We continue to believe that the problem lies not with Joyce’s words, but with our limited intellectual resources in decoding them. Boorstin cites unsourced “knowledgeable interpreters” who described it as “notoriously the most obscure book ever written by a major writer; at least, by one who was believed not to be out of his mind.”
As for Joyce himself, he also seemed to be uncertain about what the book was about. “It’s hard to say,” Joyce reportedly told a sculptor friend of his work in progress, in 1923. “It’s like a mountain that I tunnel into from every direction, but I don’t know what I will find.” By that time he had christened it Finnegans Wake, excising the apostrophe because of the subplot concerning the death of Finnegan and resurrection of all Finnegans (Finnagain).
I decided to give Joyce another shot. Boosted, you might say. Maybe if I read FW at bedtime I could get the gist better without stumbling over his many neologisms. I opened it at random.
“Venuses were gigglibly temptatrix, vulcans guffawably eruptious and the whole wives’ world frockful of fickles. Fact, any human inyon you liked any erenoon or efter would take her bare godkin out, or an even pair of hem, (lugod ! lugodoo!) and. . . .”
Zzzzzzz.
To mythologist Joseph Campbell, one of the few academic interpreters to have swallowed FW whole and spat out a thesis on it, it’s “a huge time capsule, the book is a kind of terminal moraine in which lie buried all the myth, programs, hopes, prayers, tools, educational theories, and theological bric-a-brac of the past millennium.”
Sure, Joe. I wouldn’t know, myself: I only got as far as the second page. It was a technical knockout. If Joyce was a heavyweight author with an intention beyond a 688-page ‘screw you’ to casual readers, then I’m Queen Beatrice of the Netherlands.
But I have to qualify that. I’m a huge fan of writer Robert Anton Wilson, who was a huge fan of James Joyce and Finnegans Wake in particular. Neither Campbell and Wilson ever struck me as bullshitters, and both were brilliant. However, Wilson did observe that “[Psychoanalyst Carl Gustav] Jung thought Joyce was a man on the edge of schizophrenia who remained on the safe side through his art: if he lost his art he’d go complete wack-o.”
I’m not about to disagree with Campbell and Wilson that the book contains an extraordinary amount of encoded brilliance. It’s just that I hail from the journalism world, where about the worst crime you can commit as a writer - besides outright fabrication - is to be deliberately obscure, to the point of unreadability.
The biggest and weirdest word game ever penned, FW is also famous for lending its obscurity to that of atomic physics. When Nobel Prize-winner Murray Gell-Mann was looking for a name for the ultimate constituents of matter, he remembered a line from the book: “three quarks for munster Mark.”
Bravo, Jim. You dreamed up Finnegans Wake and mostly got away with it. Your Eliot-approved Tower of Babble has inspired everyone from from the Beat writers to Beatle John Lennon to particle physicists. Happy Bloomsday, ya fruitcake.
Revision of an article that first appeared in the Globe and Mail.
I know the feeling you're conveying in this article so well; that you really want to read, or like the idea of a certain well known or notorious book, but that you just can't penetrate the damn thing. You know, it seemed like a great idea to really sit down and tackle Philip K Dick's Exegesis; but it just ain't gonna happen. It's happened to me with a fair few others as well. I've had to really drag myself though William S Buroughs when he's been in his "cut up" mode.
I went straight to the dictionary at 'vicus' too. I note one spot above here a gremlin changed FW to FB. Would JJ love the net-fused literary jumble of our current age or would he now polarize in the other direction? Perhaps he inserted that little quip...