On reading ‘Finnegans Wake’

In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance and thereinofter you’re in the unbewised again, vund vulsyvolsy.

So. I finally finished Finnegan.

These words are no sooner out of my mouth, though, than I regret them, because it’s clear to me already I have barely begun to read this extraordinary work. When I say I’ve ‘read’ Finnegan’s Wake, I’m aware that all I’ve done, really, is pushed on through the text, mouthing it to myself, letting it roll around on my tongue, while once or twice glancing sideways at Wikipedia or the introduction of the Penguin edition to glean some clue as to what might be ‘really’ going on in this novel.

For better or worse, I’ve always preferred to read without the aid of critics or other explainers — which is possibly one reason why I always found the formal study of English literature at school and university challenging. In exams, I much preferred writing about an ‘unsighted’ piece to explaining my views about some poem or novel or drama on the syllabus where I was presumably expected to demonstrate an awareness of the critical tradition surrounding the work concerned.

For understandable reasons, there is now a pile of exegesis associated with Finnegans Wake, but for me this makes it only more a matter of joy and celebration that I have been able to stagger to the top of Joyce’s mountain — blind and blinkered, admittedly — but largely unassisted by exegetical oxygen. And if I have made it back to base camp with only a few blurry Polaroids to show for my trouble, at least I have some idea of the terrain now.

So what’s it like to read Finnegans Wake — and is it worth it?

Well, the going is definitely hard, but the journey is much more entertaining and interesting than I’d been expecting. If you’re interested in expanding your ideas about what can speech and language can do — indeed, about what speech and language actually are — this is a trip worth considering.

Not pure gobbledygook

I first got interested in reading Finnegans Wake after hearing Andy Miller talk about his reading experience in episodes three and four of the Backlisted podcast. I’d always understood Finnegans Wake to be unreadable, but Miller dispelled that impression. He had, in a sense, forced himself to read the novel by engaging to read it for a certain period of time each morning — which doesn’t necessarily sound like fun — but after he had finished the work, Miller spoke of his reading experience quite positively.

I reckon I understood probably ten percent of what was happening, but the ten percent I read gave me enormous pleasure, and actually the sense of having read it has given me great pleasure as well…You don’t read it and think ‘this is pure rubbish or pure gobbledygook’. You can sense a genius guiding hand behind it, and whatever you take away from it, you should be happy to take away from it.

Having now read the novel myself using a similar approach to Miller’s (ie, ‘forcing’ myself to read a daily quota) I would concur with Miller’s comments completely.

Don’t be a Scrooge (like I was)

As an aside, there is one aspect of how I read Finnegans Wake that I would not recommend. To my subsequent regret, I began by downloading a cheap version to my Kindle. I soon found out this cheap version featured some very odd patterns of mid-line hyphenation and omitted some word spacings in a way that I initially assumed (incorrectly) to be Joyce’s own usage.

I subsequently bought the Penguin edition for Kindle and resumed reading where I had left off the other edition. This also proved to be something of a mistake, in that I did not discover until I had finished the Penguin version that it included a table of contents whose wording implied quite a lot of information about the structure of the novel. This table of contents was missing in the first version I read.

What’s it like to read?

If you’ve come this far, you’re probably hoping to get some sense of what Finnegans Wake is like to read.

Well, to be honest, a lot of it is simply unintelligible to a naive reader like me, at least on one level.

Here’s a passage picked out at random (truly!):

Scholium, there are trist sigheds to everysing but ichs on the freed brings euchs to the feared. Qued? Mother of us all! O, dear me, look at that now! I don’t know is it your spictre or my omination but I’m glad you dimentioned it! My Lourde! My Lourde! If that aint just the beatenest lay I ever see! And a superpbosition! Quoint a quincidence! O.K. Omnius Kollidimus. As Ollover Krumwall sayed when he slepped ueber his grannya-mother. Kangaroose feathers. Who in the name of thunder’d ever belevin you were that bolt?

There are fragments of this we can make sense of, obviously. There appears to be some kind of joke involving Oliver Cromwell and his grandmother. There’s a reference to kangaroo feathers, whatever they may be. We can hear, more than see, familiar words like spectre and co-incidence. But what does the passage as a whole mean?

I’m guessing that in one of the many tomes written about Finnegans Wake since the novel was first published in 1939 there is some kind of a reading of this (to me) largely obscure passage. Perhaps one day I will be drawn to read some of this exegetic work — but for now, I must admit, I find the idea distasteful, and am happy to have been able to take away anything from my own first reading of Finnegan’s Wake.

I’d make one more point about the random passage I’ve quoted above. For all that it’s unintelligible at one level, we can tell that what we’re hearing is a human voice with its own lilt, its own tone of interrogative exasperation, its own life and energy.

This sense of quirky life and energy in the text — heard life, heard energy — predominates throughout the novel, even as one voice mutates into another, so that we often feel — well, I often felt — like I was in the position of someone overhearing a conversation through a wall, where I could hear quite clearly the dynamics of the conversation but making out only the occasional word. Or, to mix the metaphor, if reading Madame Bovary is like looking through a window at a sunlit scene at midday, reading Finnegans Wake can be like peering through a glass brick at a scene lit by gaslight. We know there’s something going on through there, but it’s often hard to tell what it is.

Finnegan’s fun

What I wasn’t prepared for at all is how much fun there is in Finnegans Wake. I knew, or thought I know, that the word quark appeared somewhere in the text, and that there was a line in it somewhere to the effect that we were all so much Junger then and easily Freudened (which turns out to be not quite true, but almost).

I won’t claim Finnegans Wake made me laugh on every page (which Anthony Burgess claimed for himself), but it is certainly a very funny book, displaying a wicked wit, much of it very aural.

For example, Joyce loves to play with popular sayings, and these often pop up, seemingly out of nowhere. Thus, punning on Wilde’s often-quoted description of foxhunters as the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible, Joyce describes one of his characters as The inimitable in puresuet of the inevitable. He says of a gadabout woman that she is Casting her perils before swains, and reminds us ’Tis an ill weed blows no poppy good.

Other gems of this kind include:

• Trickspissers vill be pairsecluded
• Making the lobbard change hisstops
• No martyr where the preature is there’s no plagues like rome
• What’s good for the gorse is a goad for the garden
• Now let bygones be bei Gunne’s

We catch all these allusions by their sound, not by their appearance in print, and in doing so, we feel ourselves being nudged back into an earlier, older way of using language.

Sometimes these aphorisms seem to be Joyce’s own coinage, as with the following:

• No Sturm. No Drang.
• any filly in a fog
• Beauties don’t answer and the rich never pays.
• You’ll pay for each bally sorraday night every billing sumday morning.
• You cannot make a limousine lady out of a hillman minx.
• Where you truss be circumspicious and look before you leak, dears.

Joyce loves to pick up and echo the sound and rhythm of children’s songs and rhymes, too. Here are a few I noticed:

• Psing a psalm of psexpeans, apocryphul of rhyme.
• yunker doodler wanked to wall awriting off his phoney
• Ten men, ton men, pen men, pun men, wont to rise a ladder.
• Before all the King’s Hoarsers with all the Queen’s Mum.
• Two pretty mistletots, ribboned to a tree, up rose liberator and, fancy, they were free!

Famous lines from Shakespeare’s plays are not immune to this kind of treatment, either:

• Ough, ough, brieve kindli!
• Where it is nobler in the main to supper than the boys and errors of outrager’s virtue.
• What’s Hiccupper to hem or her to Hagaba?
• To me or not to me.

Familiar lines from the liturgy have their sense transformed, but retain enough of their aural shape for us to recognise them:

• Lard have mustard on them!
• Bring us this days our maily bag!
• oura vatars that arred in Himmal, harruad bathar namas
• Haar Faagher, wild heart in Homelan; Harrod’s be the naun. Mine kinder come, mine wohl be won. There is nothing like leuther.
• lead us not into reformication with the poors in your thingdom of gory, O moan!
• As they warred in their big innings ease now we never shall know.

In a similar vein, the ninth and tenth commandment are elided and transmuted into Stringstly is it forbidden by the honorary tenth commendmant to shall not bare full sweetness against a nighboor’s wiles.

Over and over, Joyce tickles our ears, bewildering our eyes, giving us victuum gleaner for vacuum cleaner, her midgetsy for Her Majesty, The aliments of jumeantry for Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, connundurumchuff for commander-in-chief.

We meet famous figures in new clothes, like Jaun Dyspeptist, the divine comic Denti Alligator, Great Shapesphere, and even Alis, alas, she broke the glass! Liddell lokker dirough the leafery (perhaps better known to us as the central figure in Ellis threw his cookingclass).

There are even references to our own antipodean selves (presumably) with in ostralian someplace, and Tossmania, and astraylians in island.

There are other splendours too

As in Ulysses, we sometimes get extended passages written in a familiar, distinctive register that we associate with some domain of daily life. Here’s part of an extended riff that plays with the conventions of legalese:

The jury (a sour dozen of stout fellows all of whom were curiously named after doyles) naturally disagreed jointly and severally, and the belligerent judge, disagreeing with the allied jurors’ disagreement, went outside his jurisfiction altogether and ordered a garnishee attachment to the neutral firm. No mandamus could locate the depleted whilom Breyfawkes as he had entered into an ancient moratorium, dating back to the times of the early barters, and only the junior partner Barren could be found, who entered an appearance and turned up, upon a notice of motion and after service of the motion by interlocutory injunction, among the male jurors to be an absolete turfwoman, originally from the proletarian class, with still a good title to her sexname of Ann Doyle, 2 Coppinger’s Cottages, the Doyle’s country.

The following extract from a much longer passage sounds like part of the plot synopsis of a preposterous opera, the kind of thing one might find printed in the program notes:

Magravius knows from spies that Anita has formerly committed double sacrilege with Michael, vulgo Cerularius, a perpetual curate, who wishes to seduce Eugenius. Magravius threatens to have Anita molested by Sulla, an orthodox savage (and leader of a band of twelve mercenaries, the Sullivani), who desires to procure Felicia for Gregorius, Leo, Vitellius and Macdugalius, four excavators, if she will not yield to him and also deceive Honuphrius by rendering conjugal duty when demanded.

The Monty Python crew were certainly not the first working this comic vein.

On the subject of ‘conjugal duty’, there are numerous passages in Finnegans Wake that appear to carry a sexual import, although it can difficult sometimes to pin down just what kind of sexual encounter is being alluded to. Here are some examples:

• He fell for my lips, for my lisp, for my lewd speaker. I felt for his strength, his manhood, his do you mind? There can be no candle to hold to it, can there?
• ’Twas my lord of Glendalough benedixed the gape for me that time at Long Entry, commanding the approaches to my intimast innermost.
• they found him guilty of their and those imputations of fornicolopulation with two of his albowcrural correlations on whom he was said to have enjoyed by anticipation when schooling them in amown, mid grass, she sat, when man was, amazingly frank, for their first conjugation whose colours at standing up from the above were of a pretty carnation
• my charmer, whom I dipped my hand in, he simply showed me his propendiculous loadpoker, Seaserpents hisses sissastones

Once or twice, Joyce reminds us that he is still capable of delivering something like the naturalistic descriptive prose he used in Dubliners, as in the following portrait of a man-about-town seen through the eyes of a woman who is not, at this moment, particularly enamoured of him:

I’ll not be complete in fighting lust until I contrive to half kill your Charley you’re my darling for you and send him to Home Surgeon Hume, the algebrist, before his appointed time, particularly should he turn out to be a man in brown about town, Rollo the Gunger, son of a wants a flurewaltzer to Arnolff’s, picking up ideas, of well over or about fiftysix or so, pithecoid proportions, with perhops five foot eight, the usual X Y Z type, R.C. Toc H, nothing but claret, not in the studbook by a long stortch, with a toothbrush moustache and jawcrockeries, alias grinner through collar, and of course no beard, meat and colmans suit, with tar’s baggy slacks, obviously too roomy for him and springside boots, washing tie, Father Mathew’s bridge pin, sipping some Wheatley’s at Rhoss’s on a barstool, with some pubpal of the Olaf Stout kidney, always trying to poorchase movables by hebomedaries for to putt in a new house to loot, cigarette in his holder, with a good job and pension in Buinness’s, what about our trip to Normandy style conversation, with an occasional they say that filmacoulored featured at the Mothrapurl skrene about Michan and his lost angeleens is corkyshows do morvaloos, blueygreen eyes a bit scummy developing a series of angry boils with certain references to the Deity, seeking relief in alcohol and so on, general omnibus character with a dash of railwaybrain, stale cough and an occasional twinge of claudication, having his favourite fecundclass family of upwards of a decade, both harefoot and loadenbrogued, to boot and buy off, Imean.

There is so much packed in here, but who could go past not in the studbook by a long stortch or what about our trip to Normandy style conversation or a dash of railwaybrain?

And finally, there is some really lyrical writing in Finnegans Wake too — not a lot of it perhaps (that I noticed, anyway), but when Joyce chooses to, he can be very moving. Here are three examples, the third of which appears almost at the end of the novel:

We may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we’re presurely destined to be odd’s without ends.

And the Stellas were shinings. And the earthnight strewed aromatose. His pibrook creppt mong the donkness. A reek was waft on the luftstream. He was ours, all fragrance. And we were his for a lifetime. O dulcid dreamings languidous! Taboccoo!

How small it’s all! And me letting on to meself always. And lilting on all the time. I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You’re only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You’re but a puny…. Loonely in me loneness. For all their faults. I am passing out. O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms.

Food for thought

You don’t have to be a literary scholar to get a lot out of reading Finnegans Wake, for all the novel’s many baffling qualities (which I certainly wouldn’t want to underplay).

Finnegans Wake is not a page-turner, and if you do take it on, you’re going to have to push yourself a little. Do that, though, and you will certainly come away with an enriched appreciation of language as it happens in the mouth and ear, and of how even language that you cannot understand in a literal sense may nevertheless carry other levels of meaning, including a palpable sense of liveliness and engagement.

You will also, surprisingly often, be most royally amused.

So here’s what I’d be interested to hear about from you:

• Have you ever read Finnegans Wake yourself, and if so, what are your memories of the experience?
• Have you ever found any point in reading a so-called ‘difficult book’ (maybe Moby Dick, or Proust, or Infinite Jest, perhaps)?
• Is there any ‘difficult book’ you’d particularly recommend to me or other readers of this post, and if so, why?