However...
I decided to finally do it--read what is often rated as the hardest book in the English language: Finnegan's Wake. I'm up to page 50 of some 620+ in my edition, which is the original, without later corrections, the Penguin Classic, re-published in 1997. I've read almost everything else by Joyce, and he is one of my favorite writers with his bizarro sense of humor. On one level this book is just an elaborate joke--just the title: who the hell is Finnegan, and why is he having a wake? Did he die? Is it a good old fashioned Irish Wake, full of drunken tears and memories? Of course! Or, is it the other meaning of wake, as in wake up!! ?? Yes.This may make sense to even the most newbie Joyce reader, who has probably been told ad nauseam to look for the EPIPHANIES! in Joyce.
I am using, somewhat grudgingly, two or three books to help me: Anthony Burgess' Re Joyce and Tindall's guide. I also checked out some stuff Joseph Campbell said about Joyce, Ulysses (which I've read twice), and Finnegan's Wake(a whole page in The Power of Myth which is Bill Moyer's interviews with JC). Also, I read a lot of Jung in the past, and that, along with the general point of view of Campbell, I think will help me a lot. Well, this is my kind of book, anyway--dreamlike, non-linear, full of triple and quadruple meaning. Nothing nailed down, not even the characters.
My original idea, and I did do the 1st chapter this way--was to just read, total emersion, like it's poetry or a very long song lyric. Not worry about logical sense, and especially not plot! (I'm not sure there is one, except for the usual Everyman theme. But then a friend told me about the Burgess--who I adore! and I already had the Tindall, plus other people who'd read it were telling me stuff, so I said, ok,ok, and ordered the Burgess--which, of course, is brilliant and insightful. He's also a word-gamer--his book about Shakespeare Nothing Like the Sun, has that playful quality--he's the perfect writer to get in the crevices of Joyce. Just the title proves that: I thought my friend had omitted a colon --should be Re: Joyce, no? No. It's a pun, wordgame--Rejoice. And the other. But you had to leave out the colon to make both work.
Several sources told me I was on the right path by trying to be pathless with FW. Most sources point out it's a night book, as opposed to the daybook that is Ulysses. Ulysses attempts to record all the thoughts of one man, Leopold Bloom, on a particular day, June 16th, so called Bloomsday (6 days after my own birthday), but FW has the harder task of recording a man's night. Now if you're gonna be a stickler you'd notice that much of Ulysses takes place at night--particularly all those drunken journeys through Dublin streets. But what is really meant by a daybook is that it's more or less conscious thoughts of a man awake. FW is about the other kinds of thinking--the dreamlike, untethered, unconscious or subconscious world of some man's mind--this time HCE. Maybe Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. or Here Comes Everyone. or Heroun Childeric Eggeberth. Or Adam, Jesus, Noah, Arthur, the Fisher King...just, a male adult (father?)everybody. It's a joke, the names are jokes--an archetype just like Jung says. His Wife Anna Earwicker is likewise Eve, the blessed virgin, Sarah...a host of mothers of all sorts, and his twin boys Shem and Shaun disperse into a million other Castor and Polluxian names. Mutt and Jeff or Jute and Mute...
It's a joke. But it also, I recently figured out, imitates the way our dream selves and our other dream people morph into a thousand forms. How often do I dream I have my consciousness, but not my body, my age, my legs, my teeth, which always seem to be melting or falling out or turning strange colors. Same with my friends and family: they rarely sit still long enough in one form for me to consciously recognize them. Instead I seem to subconsciously recognize them--that 20year old diving off a cliff is supposed to be my mother--that guy in the truck is (or was?) my romantic interest? Here's another weirdo I need to get away from...why is this obscure movie star in my dream, serving ice cream?
I think quotes are gonna have to help explain this book, more than anything. It will definitely explain why so many people find it funny and absurd. Buuu....t so tedious to quote--gonna have to find an online source to copy/paste.
Here's the confusing opening line, for posterity:
“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.”
Okay, so the river is the Liffey, Adam and Eve are HCE and wife, and rest tells you basically you are in Dublin. Everyone makes a big deal about how the story goes in a circle, and the last line, unfinished, is meant to meet up with the beginning again...
Last line..
"A way a lone a last a loved a long the..."
Here's just a representative line of Joyce's tomfoolery with words--but, beware the bandersnatch! The more you think about them, the more you realize the spelling mistakes are not mistakes or even pure portmanteaus like in Alice- (It does borrow Alice..):
--------see? It's just....grasshopper music or something? Why Grace not grass? why hoper not hopper? Seems a reason, if one could find the fool thing. It does seem to be funny, and happy, for no reason except that it Is.
For some reason this book makes me think of a Japanese word I was recently taught by a friend. Wabi-Sabi. She explained it as that thing you see in Japanese art where an imperfection, particularly in symmetry? makes the work more beautiful. Like a vase with a hairline crack, implicating its fragility and delicacy--the source of it's beauty.
An online source explained it a little differently:
"Wabi-sabi" refers to a way of living that focuses on finding beauty within the imperfections of life and peacefully accepting the natural cycle of growth and decay."
Both of these work perfectly to explain Finnegan's Wake, not to mention Re Joyce (with its artful imperfection of the missing colon). The latter is where I was struck with this idea in the first place, and hooked it up with Lori's Wabi-sabi. Burgess explains about Joyce's epiphanies in Ch. 3, "The Paralyzed City" (this is a reference to Dubliners--where he points out the common thread of characters paralyzed, by morality, outside pressures, to resist happiness or other means of self-fulfillment). Anyway, Burgess, himself an old Catholic boy--funny how we gravitate--points out Joyce's study of the logicians' Catholic-- Thomas Aquinas (Jesuit favorite, see how damned Catholic I am?) Aquinas, like the ancient Greeks tried to define the nature of beauty--I could extrapolate to Keats and say also truth and also art---
Aquinas' notion of beauty is that it must encompass three qualities: integrity, symmetry, and radiance. What a word, radiance--a favorite. The first two maybe seem fairly obvious, although with integrity I think Aquinas was thinking more in mathematical terms, about the oneness of the thing. But what really struck me was the importance of the radiance--Burgess explains the quidditas or "Whatness" of the thing--what achieves epiphany or radiance is when the whatness of an object or moment comes shining out of it, usually in a rather ironic way. He points out the original epiphany: three wise kings find God is in a dirty, ordinary stable. Wow.
Here's a great quote from Burgess that develops this idea: "The glory and mystery of art can lie in the tension between the appearance and the reality, or rather, between the subject matter and what it is made of." So, why is a cracked vase (wabi-sabi) more beautiful than its unsullied sister? Radiance shines from the crack. Because it highlights its delicate nature. " God found on earth "highlights the contrast between mortality and immortality. Why do old buildings in ancient places (Rome, Moscow, Ireland, Greece) look more beautiful with layers of peeling paint, vines, or lichens? Wabi-sabi. Why is Venus De Milo still art, without arms? Winged Victory without a head?
I think this is really giving me some sort of platform or at least goal in my own art.
July 22: I'm sure I'm not the first to consider that this whole book is just an elaborate joke of gibberish that Joyce writes when he's gotten three-quarters of the way through his nightly bottle of Jameson's.
September 11: I'm up to p. 126. People all over are giving me hints how to read this, and though it helps some, other things are maybe continuing the confusion. There seems to be a layered reference to it's 4 part structure. Some dude's: Vico? sees history as cyclic with ages of gods, heroes, and humans, cycling back to gods.? I think it is, that the book also has 4 parts. Other patterns allude to the 4 parts, such as the using comical variations of the names of the authors of the Gospels. Book ! is referred to the Book of the Parents, and seems to center on some vague, obscene crime performed in a park (Phoenix Park, for Christ's sake, haha) by HCE, whereby he is defended somehow by a letter from his wife ALP (Anna Livia). There's some weird parallel betw' HCE and the titular Character, Finnegan, who supposedly dies falling off a wall he was building of brick, and who also has some relation to Finn MacCool, an Irish folklore warrior-character who is rumored, like Arthur, to have never died, hiding in a cave to return one day--Especially beloved of Fenians (i.e., Irish nationalists, the original I.R.A.). That's a whole lot about dying and being reborn!!
So Finn (again) falls off a wall, and dies, and becomes a pubowner named HCE who defiles some two girls, who goes on trial, and????
Page 126: --- "killed his own hungery self as a young man"
June 18--two after Bloomsday, and yes, I just reread the 1st chapter of Ulysses. I'm at around 340, just finished a chapter of the kids doing their homework--smart kids! Latin and algebra and all...The next chapter now seems to be yet another in a pub with drunks, but HCE's pub, near closing time, so I'm anticipating a really serios dream sequence very soon, after all the pub blarney. Seems perhaps his missus has been fooling with some Russian officer..even some mangled Russian языкь in this part.
For some reason this book makes me think of a Japanese word I was recently taught by a friend. Wabi-Sabi. She explained it as that thing you see in Japanese art where an imperfection, particularly in symmetry? makes the work more beautiful. Like a vase with a hairline crack, implicating its fragility and delicacy--the source of it's beauty.
An online source explained it a little differently:
"Wabi-sabi" refers to a way of living that focuses on finding beauty within the imperfections of life and peacefully accepting the natural cycle of growth and decay."
Both of these work perfectly to explain Finnegan's Wake, not to mention Re Joyce (with its artful imperfection of the missing colon). The latter is where I was struck with this idea in the first place, and hooked it up with Lori's Wabi-sabi. Burgess explains about Joyce's epiphanies in Ch. 3, "The Paralyzed City" (this is a reference to Dubliners--where he points out the common thread of characters paralyzed, by morality, outside pressures, to resist happiness or other means of self-fulfillment). Anyway, Burgess, himself an old Catholic boy--funny how we gravitate--points out Joyce's study of the logicians' Catholic-- Thomas Aquinas (Jesuit favorite, see how damned Catholic I am?) Aquinas, like the ancient Greeks tried to define the nature of beauty--I could extrapolate to Keats and say also truth and also art---
Aquinas' notion of beauty is that it must encompass three qualities: integrity, symmetry, and radiance. What a word, radiance--a favorite. The first two maybe seem fairly obvious, although with integrity I think Aquinas was thinking more in mathematical terms, about the oneness of the thing. But what really struck me was the importance of the radiance--Burgess explains the quidditas or "Whatness" of the thing--what achieves epiphany or radiance is when the whatness of an object or moment comes shining out of it, usually in a rather ironic way. He points out the original epiphany: three wise kings find God is in a dirty, ordinary stable. Wow.
Here's a great quote from Burgess that develops this idea: "The glory and mystery of art can lie in the tension between the appearance and the reality, or rather, between the subject matter and what it is made of." So, why is a cracked vase (wabi-sabi) more beautiful than its unsullied sister? Radiance shines from the crack. Because it highlights its delicate nature. " God found on earth "highlights the contrast between mortality and immortality. Why do old buildings in ancient places (Rome, Moscow, Ireland, Greece) look more beautiful with layers of peeling paint, vines, or lichens? Wabi-sabi. Why is Venus De Milo still art, without arms? Winged Victory without a head?
I think this is really giving me some sort of platform or at least goal in my own art.
July 22: I'm sure I'm not the first to consider that this whole book is just an elaborate joke of gibberish that Joyce writes when he's gotten three-quarters of the way through his nightly bottle of Jameson's.
September 11: I'm up to p. 126. People all over are giving me hints how to read this, and though it helps some, other things are maybe continuing the confusion. There seems to be a layered reference to it's 4 part structure. Some dude's: Vico? sees history as cyclic with ages of gods, heroes, and humans, cycling back to gods.? I think it is, that the book also has 4 parts. Other patterns allude to the 4 parts, such as the using comical variations of the names of the authors of the Gospels. Book ! is referred to the Book of the Parents, and seems to center on some vague, obscene crime performed in a park (Phoenix Park, for Christ's sake, haha) by HCE, whereby he is defended somehow by a letter from his wife ALP (Anna Livia). There's some weird parallel betw' HCE and the titular Character, Finnegan, who supposedly dies falling off a wall he was building of brick, and who also has some relation to Finn MacCool, an Irish folklore warrior-character who is rumored, like Arthur, to have never died, hiding in a cave to return one day--Especially beloved of Fenians (i.e., Irish nationalists, the original I.R.A.). That's a whole lot about dying and being reborn!!
So Finn (again) falls off a wall, and dies, and becomes a pubowner named HCE who defiles some two girls, who goes on trial, and????
Page 126: --- "killed his own hungery self as a young man"
June 18--two after Bloomsday, and yes, I just reread the 1st chapter of Ulysses. I'm at around 340, just finished a chapter of the kids doing their homework--smart kids! Latin and algebra and all...The next chapter now seems to be yet another in a pub with drunks, but HCE's pub, near closing time, so I'm anticipating a really serios dream sequence very soon, after all the pub blarney. Seems perhaps his missus has been fooling with some Russian officer..even some mangled Russian языкь in this part.
