How to Read Finnegans Wake

Guest Column by Joel Schechter

“Due to its linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and abandonment of narrative conventions, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public.”  —Wikipedia

Fifty years ago,  I purchased a copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and started to read it. I know I am not the only one who started to read Joyce’s book, then stopped.  Many readers probably know the first line: “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.” Over the years I returned to the book, read that line and a few pages, then closed the book. I took a break for about thirty years. Now I’m reading it again, though I’m far from finished.

James Joyce took seventeen years (1922-1939) to complete the volume, which some critics call an experimental novel and Wikipedia says “remains largely unread by the general public.” The text is filled with puns, portmanteaux, and multilingual composite words that some critics welcome as a new language. Other people have dismissed the book as a hoax, an “unread classic,” 622 pages of nonsense. To illustrate the difficulties the book offers, someone might cite, for example, footnote #1 on page 278: “Gosem pher, gezumpher, greeze a jarry grim felon! Good bloke him!”

Not all the lines are that difficult.

Most critics agree that over the course of the book, Joyce tells the story of an Irish pub-keeper named Humphrey Earwicker, his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle, their children, and the history of the world. Among the book’s most fervent advocates,  Edmund Wilson proclaimed: “The chance to explore the wonders of Finnegans Wake is one of the few great intellectual and esthetic treats that these years have yielded.”   Members of Finnegans Wake societies convene to interpret the book’s complexities line by line. 

Joyce himself once told editor Max Eastman: “The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.” That sentiment is the one I want to explicate here. After discovering that quote about a life of devotion to the author,  and knowing that Joyce welcomed wordplay and facilitated the reading of multiple meanings into his words, I decided to devote my whole life to reading Finnegans Wake, but only for a few minutes and a few lines each day. If I do nothing else during those few minutes, I briefly will be devoting my life wholly to Joyce.

I am being literal here, but so was the Irish author. By this logic, since I haven’t finished the book,  my devotion is incomplete — a story without an end — as is Finnegans Wake. Joyce inserts no period in the book’s last sentence; his closing line  (“A way a lone a last a loved a long the”)  continues, or resumes, on the book’s first page with “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s,” a circular structure about which the reference to “recirculation” hints on page one.

Every day I delay finishing the book. Now about halfway through, I’m taking my time,  returning to earlier pages,  progressing slowly, if you can call it progress, this (so far) endless reading. My project can be seen as a Joycean version of One Thousand and One Nights, another almost endless story. Perhaps my dawdling pace owes a debt to another Irish-born author, too: Laurence Sterne, in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, begins his story before the title character is born, and takes his time with digressions, self-assessments,  intermissions, ellipses. He is in no hurry to reach the end.

Joyce’s expectation of lifetime devotion to his work by readers also recalls George Bernard Shaw’s tribute to the playwright Henrik Ibsen (whose plays Joyce, too, admired). Shaw viewed Ibsen’s new, iconoclastic dramas so favorably that he wrote if Europeans had fully understood Ibsen,  millions of lives would have been saved —  the first World War never would have been fought. I’m not certain whether the war would have been avoided because everyone was too busy reading and staging Ibsen, or because his plays such as A Doll House and An Enemy of the People advocated fierce respect for individual freedom and honesty, which were incompatible with war.  Either way,  chances of war would have been reduced.

I don’t regard these authors as miracle-workers, and I have doubts that their writing can sustain and save lives, but I think that Finnegans Wake and other daunting works of literature could be more than literary diversions, especially if they become required reading for military generals, war-prone statesmen and armaments manufacturers. If they spent billions not on new weapons but instead on education, healthcare, housing, and public libraries, and if  our leaders were busy  reading Ibsen, Shaw, Joyce — and let’s add Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (an antiwar essay) and Arundhati Roy’s Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (essays against empire and worse) —  if they had to spend more time parsing the words of others, novels as well as peace plans, the world might be a more literate and longer-lasting place.

______________

Joel Schechter is the author of Messiahs of 1933: How American Yiddish Theatre Survived Adversity through Satire and The Pickle Clowns: New American Circus Comedy, among other books. Joel is emeritus professor of theatre and dance at San Francisco State University.