The Wake

 

   I used to give a book fifty pages to convince me I should finish it. Now I decide after the first sentence. I recently started a book whose introduction started off- "This book is unreadable". The book is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. I had read and understood Joyce's previous book, the notoriously difficult Ulysses. I had read Ulysses twice previously without understanding much of it. I had been an English major and felt I needed to be able to say I had at least read it.

   I was able to master Ulysses on the third try with the help of two fellow Wannaskan Almanac writers, Catherine Stenzel and Kim Hruba. For a year and a half through Covid we read a chapter a month and met monthly via Zoom to discuss and argue over the chapters. The book takes place on a single June day in Dublin in 1904, and follows the interconnected activities of three Dubliners as they go about the city. 

   There is a story going on in Ulysses but it's confusing to discern what it is. By reading a guide I understood how things held together. Also, it's more fun to listen to the audio version of the book.  Now I know what a great book it is. It took Joyce seven years to write Ulysses. Once he finished, he started on Finnegans Wake. It took him 17 years, pretty much the rest of his life, to write the Wake. He lived with his wife and two children in Paris most of that time, relying on patrons for support. He always spent more than he took in.  

   His patrons had been able, with a little effort, to see what Joyce was doing in Ulysses, but the Wake was... unreadable. But the patrons had faith and kept footing the bill until 1939 when Joyce wrapped it up and sent it to the printer. Joyce was miffed that no one understood his new book. Then the Nazis took over Paris and Joyce and his family moved to Switzerland. He died from a perforated ulcer the next year at age 58.

   Potentially sympathetic readers found the Wake baffling or misguided. Two scholars spent five years deciphering the book, publishing A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake in 1944. I bought a used copy of the Wake several years ago and stuck it on a remote shelf. It sat there till recently when fellow Almanac writer Joe Stenzel told me he was reading the book. A professor had ordered him to buy the book in college and told him to put it away till he was older. Joe says he's older now.

   He's reading the book cold- no guide, no audio, but he does say it helps to read it aloud. I decided to give it a try. Before starting, I read several online reviews. Many people said the book was a joke or a hoax and don't waste your time. Others loved it and called it the best book ever written. The group in the middle said, yeah, it's unreadable, but if you give it a chance it becomes strangely addictive.  Read it aloud, they say.

   What is the Wake about, if anything? Samuel Beckett, Joyce's fellow mad Irishman, says the book "is not about something; it is that something itself". Most explanations of the book are unhelpful. It's supposedly the dream of a pub owner in Dublin. His sleep is disturbed by guilt over some supposed transgression he may or may not have committed. The whole 600 plus pages are written in the fluid, shifting, logic of the unconscious. It doesn't sound like any dream I've ever had.

   The book is also about falling- from the fall of Adam and Eve to that of Humpty Dumpty, which could put us in mind of our own inevitable fall from favor and into the grave. The title comes from the Irish ballad Finnegan's Wake about a worker who falls off a roof and dies, but is revived when whiskey is spilled on him during his wake. Poignant poganoint pokey poke poinget in throb heart (Aaaargh!) Sorry, I sometimes drop into Wakeish.

   Well I've read the first fifty pages of Finnegans Wake. Actually more than sixty pages- a good tenth of the book. Even after reading a chapter's synopsis, I don't have a clue what's going on. The synopsis bears no relation to what appears on the page. It would require a line by line analysis to understand what it all means. Is it worth it? I don't know, but it is strangely addictive.