James Joyce and His Most Dangerous Work: Finnegans Wake
Are his cult following, pop-trivia and controversies more interesting and instructive than the book?
Below is a quote from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. If you are new to James Joyce and Finnegans Wake, it may come as a shock that such literature could be valued, let alone understood.
of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes:and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishy-gods! Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax! Ualu Ualu Ualu! Quaouauh! ring¹
On one side you have the Joyceans, who make a lifework of studying Joyce’s literature. There is something of the old-fashioned bridge player, the cryptic crossword enthusiast and the code breaker in their enthused approach:
After we’d been meeting every few weeks for two months, we felt so confident of our growing understanding of Joyce’s magnum opus that we engaged in a rousing game of “Finnegans Wake” charades. We divided into teams and drew from a hat snippets of language from the early chapters. We took turns acting out the expressions while the others guessed. Mine was easy enough: Phoenix Park. I mimicked a bird swooping up from the fireplace. Katy chose to illustrate the phrase “by a commodius vicus of recirculation” by pretending to sit on a toilet. We solved each puzzle in minutes flat and felt ever so clever. I crowed, “I’ll bet we’re the only people in the world playing ‘Finnegans Wake’ charades right now!” We spent the rest of the evening in smug conversation about facets of “Finnegans Wake” while sipping from bottles of the Irish nectar Guinness stout.²
and his detractors :
(The)typical Joyce discussion of his unreadability versus his brilliance. I will not claim to be the forefront of Joyce detractors, but I have become tired of every debate constructed by Joyce supporters who mistake inaccessibility as intellectuality and complexity. For every overeducated Joyce defender, for every literary conversation ruined by the zealotry of Joycians, and for the orthodoxy of rigid literary aesthetics I say, Jihad on James Joyce! May his various prose remain unread while the seagulls flock to Dan Brown island!³
Some notable facts around Finnegans Wake: It was written over a period of seventeen years. Published in 1939, it has been called “one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language”. A modern scholar who “translated” the book into understandable English, required 175,000 pages to compose it and fifteen years to complete it. It’s estimated to take 42 years to read (I kid you not)⁴.
Joyce and his contentious estate. In 2011, 70 years after his death, copyright on his published works came to an end. Prior to this event (and after it) there had been disputes over using Joyce’s works in public:
Over the past 20 years the right to quote from or publish Joyce’s work has been a matter of increasingly heated debate. The estate’s most vocal trustee, Stephen Joyce, the author’s grandson, earned himself the reputation as the most intractable defender of any copyright in modern times⁵.
On New Year’s Eve, the Twitter feed of UbuWeb, an online archive of the avant garde, posted a link to an article in The Irish Times about the expiry of European copyright on the work of James Joyce. The link was accompanied by a curt message to Joyce’s grandson and sole living descendent: “Fuck you Stephen Joyce. EU copyright on James Joyce’s works ends at midnight.” While the language may have been unusually confrontational, the sentiment it expressed is widespread. The passage into public domain of Joyce’s major works has been talked up in certain quarters as though it were a bookish version of the destruction of the Death Star, with Stephen Joyce cast as a highbrow Darth Vader suddenly no longer in a position to breathe heavily down the necks of rebel Joyceans⁶.
This is the best (positive)summary and notation of the complexities of the book I could find:
This “new way” of telling a story in Finnegans Wake takes the form of a discontinuous dream-narrative, with abrupt changes to characters, character names, locations and plot details resulting in the absence of a discernible linear narrative, causing Herring to argue that the plot of Finnegans Wake “is unstable in that there is no one plot from beginning to end, but rather many recognizable stories and plot types with familiar and unfamiliar twists, told from varying perspectives.” Patrick A. McCarthy expands on this idea of a non-linear, digressive narrative with the contention that “throughout much of Finnegans Wake, what appears to be an attempt to tell a story is often diverted, interrupted, or reshaped into something else, for example a commentary on a narrative with conflicting or unverifiable details.” In other words, while crucial plot points — such as HCE’s crime or ALP’s letter — are endlessly discussed, the reader never encounters or experiences them first hand, and as the details are constantly changing, they remain unknown and perhaps unknowable. Suzette Henke has accordingly described Finnegans Wake as an aporia. Joyce himself tacitly acknowledged this radically different approach to language and plot in a 1926 letter to Harriet Weaver, outlining his intentions for the book: “One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.” Critics have seen a precedent for the book’s plot presentation in Laurence Sterne’s famously digressive The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, with Thomas Keymer stating that “Tristram Shandy was a natural touchstone for James Joyce as he explained his attempt “to build many planes of narrative with a single esthetic purpose” in Finnegans Wake”.⁷
Joyce on Writing:
“The important thing is not what we write,” Joyce tells Arthur Power in Conversations with James Joyce, “but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously” .⁸
With controversial, idiosyncratic and experimental writers, what surrounds them and even comes after them, is often more interesting than what they write. I have zero interest in reading any more than the first quote I put up. I’m quite sure, to really make sense of Finnegans Wake requires a lot of work, study and A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake or similar.
If you do go through the process of what is required, I doubt the outcome will add much to your writing. Why? Joyce was so obsessively dedicated and original, he expressed a level of extreme experimentation requiring too much of his audience. Much more so the modern reader, who has little interest and time for what is an enormous demand. Joyce tells us this:
“The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.”
― James Joyce
No thanks. An interesting and brilliant, writers’ life, but little to add to the writing craft itself (in my opinion).That is not to say (some) of his other books are not more approachable.
Thanks for reading Writers Guild — A Penname publication
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