Things are not as they were
James Joyce is Dublin’s best-known export—after Guinness. If you take a stroll down O’Connell Street in the city centre and ask people to name a famous Dubliner, living or dead, Joyce’s name is certain to come up several times. In today’s Dublin, children are obliged to study his works in school. Statues and busts of him constellate the city. Many of the houses in which he lived have been fitted with plates identifying them as former residences of James Joyce. Prominent locations that are featured in his novels have acquired commemorative plaques testifying to the fact. Joyce reading groups are becoming increasingly popular and increasingly numerous. A lucrative tourist industry has sprung up around the man and his writings.
Joyce is cool.
But it wasn’t always like this. Dublin’s ongoing love affair with James Joyce began in 1982, the centenary of his birth. The city, in its wisdom and in its foresight, had decided that it was time to bring this exile home and make some money out of him. Celebrations were arranged. Festivities were planned. Joyce’s one-hundredth birthday would mark a watershed in the writer’s relationship with his native city.
Perhaps the defining event of the Joyce centenary was the historic dramatization of Ulysses that was broadcast without a break by Raidió Éireann, the nation’s state-run radio station. This unabridged reading of Joyce’s most famous work began at 6:30 am on the morning of Bloomsday, Wednesday 16 June 1982, and took almost thirty hours to complete. Many people who had gone to bed on Wednesday night still ignorant of Joyce and his writings sat down to breakfast on Thursday morning, switched on the wireless, and were captivated by Pegg Monahan’s performance of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, which brought the epic reading of Ulysses to an end. For many Dubliners, this was their first exposure to Joyce’s writings.
who the joebiggar be he?
It is hard to believe that less than forty years ago—or more than forty years after his death—if you had taken that same stroll down O’Connell Street and asked one hundred people at random what their opinion of James Joyce was, approximately ninety-seven would have looked at you with a puzzled expression on their face and asked:
— James who?
Two others would have become angry, before spitting out some such remark as:
— James Joyce was a godless heathen, a writer of filth, and a disgrace to this city and country!
The remaining person would have replied:
— James Joyce was the greatest writer of the twentieth century. It is a crying shame that there is not a single statue in his native city to honour the memory of the man who wrote Ulysses.
Back in those dark ages, Joyce did not even figure in the school curriculum. His books were never actually banned by the Censorship of Publications Board, just ignored. No Minister of Education would have dared prescribe a text written by so controversial a writer. When I went to school, the novels that we were required to study were safe and respectable:
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Persuasion by Jane Austen
- Hard Times by Charles Dickens
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- Silas Marner by George Eliot
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- The Pearl by John Steinbeck
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
I first heard of Joyce in secondary school in 1980. A teacher mentioned an Irish writer who had written an epic novel that depicted the events of a single day in Dublin. He also told us that the same writer had authored another epic novel that few people could read because it was written in a language Joyce had made up. I was intrigued. The next time I was in town I went into Eason’s and had a look around. They had both books, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. I did not purchase either, but I did page through them to see what all the fuss was about. I honestly can’t remember anything about Ulysses, but to this day I still remember the first words I ever tried to read of Finnegans Wake. The volume in question was a Faber & Faber paperback of the third edition, with its distinctive black cover. I opened it at random and let my eyes fall where they would, and I began to read:
Yet may we not see still the brontoichthyan form outlined aslumbered, even in our own nighttime by the sedge of the troutling stream that Bronto loved and Brunto has a lean on. (Joyce 1975:7)
I was instantly captivated and I knew that one day I would read this book. It was clear from these few lines that the book was not written in a language Joyce had invented. This was English, though not as I had ever heard it spoken. I will not pretend that I actually remember reading these precise lines. What I recall is reading a passage that I didn’t fully understand, but which seemed to be describing a nocturnal scene: beside a stream a sleeping form is silhouetted against the night sky : young trout are swimming in the stream, and reeds are growing from its marshy banks. Joyce’s words had lifted me out of my humdrum existence and transported me to this mythical landscape.
Shortly after this very brief encounter with Joyce’s monster (Ellmann 716), I found myself watching a late-night edition of Folio, a program on RTÉ devoted to the arts in Ireland and presented by Patrick Gallagher. Gallagher’s guest was unknown to me: an Englishman called Roland McHugh, who was discussing his recently published book Annotations to Finnegans Wake. Synchronicity! This book has now gone through four editions (1980, 1991, 2006 and 2016). In the early days of Wakean studies it was an essential reference for the isolated reader trying to negotiate his or her way through Joyce’s labyrinth, but the advent of the Internet and its global community has rendered it all but redundant. I purchased a hardback copy of the first edition before I had even purchased my first copy of Finnegans Wake, and in due course I added the second and third editions to my library. And notwithstanding my opinion that the Internet has superseded McHugh’s Annotations, I will probably soon replace my third edition with the fourth.
In 1982, just as the rehabilitation of Joyce was taking place, I was released from Purgatory—or, as our American cousins put it, I graduated from high school. I had acquired a copy of Ulysses during the Joyce centenary and I finally began to read it in earnest during the summer holidays in Donegal. I still have that copy: the Penguin Modern Classics Centenary edition, a reissue of the Bodley Head’s second unlimited edition of April 1960. It was an unforgettable experience, but I found it hard going.
— If Ulysses is this difficult, I thought to myself, how much more difficult must Finnegans Wake be?
After Ulysses I explored the more accessible parts of Joyce’s œuvre—Dubliners, Exiles, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man— and Richard Ellmann’s seminal biography. I was in no rush to tackle the monster.
Another four or five years elapsed before I finally purchased a copy of Finnegans Wake and attempted to read it. My first copy was a 1986 paperback reprint of the 1975 Faber and Faber edition. It had a distinctive blue dust-jacket, and if I remember correctly it cost £8.32.
Although I had a copy of Roland McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake, I was too proud to use it. I wanted to read Finnegans Wake all by myself, and decide what it was about without any outside assistance. So I started to read in complete isolation:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs...
It was a torturous task. I was completely lost from the very first words. Having failed to grab hold of a clue in the opening chapter, I was left floundering for the rest of the book. I had no idea what was going on. I was simply ploughing my way through two or three pages of incomprehensible gibberish every day until I finally reached the end and could boast:
— Yes, I’ve read Finnegans Wake.
guide them through the labyrinth
I realized that I would need some help the second time round. Even in the mid-eighties there was no shortage of experts willing to guide the perplexed reader through the labyrinth: I began to compile a library of Wake-related books. No doubt I will have something to say about many of these in forthcoming articles, but for my second assault on Finnegans Wake the only Virgil to guide my steps through Joyce’s Inferno was Roland McHugh. I had the first edition of his Annotations to Finnegans Wake, to which I would shortly be adding the second edition. I also had another of his books, The Finnegans Wake Experience, which I had fortuitously come across in a second-hand bookshop. Serendipity!
This diminutive volume is more biographical than critical. It describes McHugh’s first frustrating encounter with the monster, how he fell in love with it, and how he eventually came to tame it. Reading Finnegans Wake was a life-changing experience for this young English entomologist. It opened up a whole new career for him as a Wakean scholar. He began reading the book in June 1964—when I was just a few months old—and he is still reading it more than half a century later.
If there is one book I would recommend to the maiden voyager about to embark on the LÉ Finnegans Wake, this is it. It is short enough to be read it in one sitting. It is relevant. It does not go into too much detail. It is about reading the book and trying to understand it. McHugh does not provide the reader with a key or a summary. Instead, he offers guidelines on how to get the most out of the book. And it is not just a good introduction to Finnegans Wake: it also introduces the newcomer to the world of Wakean scholarship.
Thirty-six years of subsequent study have undoubtedly superannuated some of McHugh’s remarks, but it is remarkable how relevant this little volume still is. The Finnegans Wake Experience is currently out of print, but it can be read online at the University of California Press:
for second time of asking
My second reading of Finnegans Wake was also conducted in isolation, but now I had McHugh and his Annotations to guide my steps. This book was designed to assist the reader of Finnegans Wake without distracting him from the task of actually reading Finnegans Wake. McHugh is a great believer in direct confrontation with Joyce’s text. You do not read his Annotations any more than you read a dictionary or a concordance: you consult them. McHugh gives the following advice:
A common approach to rendering Finnegans Wake accessible is the running translation ... the present text adopts the alternative policy of providing the glossary and omitting the structural patter, which so often merely duplicates without illuminating. What the reader must now do is to keep Finnegans Wake spotlit while mentally superimposing the annotations. Although the Annotations pages are larger than those of FW, it is quite easy to hold the open books together and scan across from FW to the glossary as one reads. This is my recommendation for making sense of Joyce’s work. (McHugh 2006:xiii ... xiii)
Perhaps my hands were smaller than McHugh’s. I found it easier to refer to a page of the Annotations if I laid the corresponding page of Finnegans Wake on the opposing page of the _Annotations, rather than trying to keep both books open at once. To this end I actually dismantled my copy of the novel, carefully tearing out all the pages one by one, and compiling a neat stack of loose leaves. When I was not using them, I clothed these 314 leaves in their distinctive blue dust-jacket.
It took me much longer to make my way through the book the second time of asking. I tried to make sense of each section before I proceeded to the next section. But it was still frustrating. The Annotations elucidated many details in the text, but the context was still lacking. I could not see the wood for the trees. I needed to step back and take in the whole of the Wake in a single glance.
Before I reached the end, I had already begun to cheat on McHugh. With increasing frequency, I found myself seeking out other people’s opinions: Anthony Burgess, Adaline Glasheen, James Atherton, Clive Hart. All opened up new vistas of interpretation for me, but none of them provided the answers I was looking for.
lovesoftfun at Finnegan’s Wake
It was really only when I started taking part in the public readings of the book at Sweny’s Pharmacy that I finally began to understand Finnegans Wake—after a fashion. In the opening article of this series, I said that the key to understanding Finnegans Wake is familiarity with the text—Familiarity breeds content—and I stand by that assertion. The more you come to know the book, the more you will get out of it. The best way to acquire the necessary degree of familiarity is to read the book through from cover to cover countless times. And the best way to do this is to take part in public readings.
Each time you read a passage, you become more intimately acquainted with it, and you get a little more out of it. And it is only when you are thoroughly familiar with the text—all them inns and ouses—that you can take that step back and comprehend the Wake in a single glance.
a pronged instrument
While researching this article I came across the following review of Finnegans Wake, written for Amazon by Roger Saxton, from Las Cruces in New Mexico:
I love Finnegans Wake, but I had to read it more than once before I felt that way about it. I read it the first time because I heard it was perhaps the most difficult book to read that had ever been written, and I wanted to see if I could do it. It took me more than two years to read it the first time. I read it with the help of the Ronald McHugh book which takes Finnegans Wake line by line and defines foreign and obscure words. I hoped that this would help me understand the book as a whole. It didn’t. There were parts here and there I could make out and puns I could enjoy, but I felt hopelessly lost and decided to have nothing more to do with the book once I had finished it. However, I could not get Finnegans Wake out of my mind and decided to tackle it again a few years later. Even though there was more that I understood then than I did the first time I read it, it was still a struggle and it appeared that it would take me as long to finish it the second time as it did the first. One night as I was reading it in a state between being awake and asleep, I started dreaming. As it usually happened, my dreams jumped around from one thing to another with no logic at all. I found myself talking with others in the dream but did not understand the gist of the conversation I was having. I understood the words, but they didn’t seem to be connected to each other. As I went in and out of this half awake and half dream state, I thought that dreaming was a lot like reading Finnegans Wake and that reading Finnegans Wake was a lot like dreaming. At that point I completely woke up and realized that my approach to reading the book could not have been more wrong-headed. Instead of trying to understand every word and paragraph, I needed to go with the flow and read steadily without stopping. If I understood something, I was happy. If I didn’t understand, so what? I kept on going. I found myself laughing at the puns and enjoying the sounds of the words. I finished the last one hundred pages in only few days. In fact, it was hard for me to put the book down even when I had other things to do. It took me only a week and a half to read it the third time, but I got far more out of it that time than I did out of the other two times put together, mainly because I didn’t try to get anything out of it! I am now reading it for the fifth time and will continue to read it off and on for the rest of my life. Do I now understand the whole book? No! I probably only understand between one fifth or one sixth of it, but that is enough to hold my interest as I read. Sometimes I encounter sentences made up of foreign words or made up words that I cannot understand at all. Then I will read a page that I can completely understand. My comprehension of what is said and what is going on fades in and out as I read just as it does when I dream, but every time I read it I pick up on things that I missed during previous readings. Instead of it being a struggle to read Finnegans Wake as it was the first time I tackled it, I now read it because I enjoy it.
I have quoted Mr Saxton’s review in full because he is not just describing his own experience of trying to come to grips with Finnegans Wake but that of many other readers as well—myself included.
I can confirm what he says about going with the flow. When you read the book alone in your room, there is always the temptation to stop after just a few paragraphs—perhaps you are finding it tough going, or there is something you want to look up. But if you read Finnegans Wake as part of a public reading group, there is no stopping. You just keep going. If one person tires of reading, the next person takes over. If a phrase intrigues you and you would like to google it or look it up in McHugh’s Annotations, there is no time—the show must go on. Reading Finnegans Wake in this manner is much more enjoyable than trying to plough through it alone and in silence. If ever a book was written to be read aloud and enjoyed communally, it was Finnegans Wake—with Ulysses a close second.
But this does not mean that we should neglect the other side of the coin: textual exegesis. Many readers find it enjoyable to take a short passage of the book and go through it word by word, chasing down all the allusions, quotations and interpretations, analysing it to the nth degree, extracting as much meaning out of it as possible. This too is best undertaken as a shared experience, though the private exegesis of Finnegans Wake is not nearly as heavy-going as the private reading of Finnegans Wake.
This is why I believe that technology—especially the emergence of the Internet—has rendered McHugh’s Annotations largely superfluous. Much as I respect McHugh’s advice, I do not think the best way to read Finnegans Wake is with Joyce in one hand and McHugh in the other, constantly scan[ning] across from FW to the glossary as one reads. This is like trying to analyse Tristan und Isolde during a live performance of the opera. You listen and you watch during the performance : You analyse Wagner’s music afterwards, at your leisure, with a copy of the full score before you and a library of appropriate references at your elbow. And hopefully both experiences are enjoyable.
I believe that this two-pronged approach to Finnegans Wake is the best one to adopt: passive reading to breed familiarity and active analysis to develop understanding.
And if you think that no work of literature can possibly be worth so much effort, then that is all right: Finnegans Wake was not written for you.
References
- Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939)
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1975)
- Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD (2016)
- Roland McHugh, The Finnegans Wake Experience, Irish Academic Press, Dublin (1981)
- Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
Image Credits
- James Joyce Statue, Dublin: Wikimedia Commons, Etiennekd, Creative Commons Attribution
- Finnegans Wake (Faber & Faber, Third Edition): © Joe Gilmore, Fair Use
- Annotations to Finnegans Wake: Goodreads, Fair Use
- Finnegans Wake: AbeBooks, Fair Use