Finnegan's Wake, by James Joyce

...have you ever swum in Finnegan’s Wake? I’ve tried reading it, more than once, and was defeated by page ten every time – not defeated by the page numbered ten, but by the time I’d got through ten pages I was sunk. Confused? You should try reading the book. You can’t imagine confusion if you haven’t – haven’t read the book, not haven’t imagined confusion. The question is, Is it a book about a gathering after a funeral, or are the pages containing the words a vessel that leaves a line of disturbance across the otherwise calm surface of oceanic consciousness? That’s why I asked if you’d ever swum in it Finnegan’s wake.

A friend gave it to me as a talking book – four CDs in all. I left it until I had time to do nothing but listen to the whole thing straight through – something that, in retrospect, I could have done at any time, just by taking a day off, but, you know how it is when what you’re doing each day seems like it has to be done on that day, which leaves no room for things that might change your world… Well in early February, an opportunity presented itself and I grabbed it with both hands, not realising the convulsive effect the book would have on me. On my second trip to Sydney in a month (this time driving rather than flying – flying is such an effort!), I took the Wake and a number of other discs. About three hours into the twelve hour journey southward, I put the first disc on thinking that I would sample it for a while. Within minutes I was hooked, and didn’t stop listening until I had played all four discs. By then I was on the Bells Line of Road – a mere 100 kilometres from my destination – which was actually Blackheath, in case you’re wondering why I would be trying to get to Sydney on that road. But, hey! Hold that thought. What sort of experience would you be having if you were trying to get to Sydney on a road that goes through the Blue Mountains?

The first thing I noticed about the Wake, the first time I tried to read it, way back in 1973, was Joyce’s idiosyncratic use of language. Having read his other two books, The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, I knew that he wrote “proper English” if I can put it that way, so I concluded that he had written the Wake in an Irish idiom, which would be “proper Irish”. But it wasn’t long before he was using words without regard for their meaning, and sometimes just making them up, and I thought, Well, he is Irish – the Irish make a lot of stuff up – and a fair few stuff ups too (unlike, say, the Americans who always tell the truth and never do wrong.) This much I could cope with. It was sort of charming, you know…. quaint. But the thing that defeated me was, what I thought at the time to be the excruciating complexity of his sentences. Not that I’ve changed my mind on that, mind you. I had encountered this to some extent in Ulysses, which is renowned for, among other things, containing the longest sentence in the English language. But in the Wake you won’t find a sentence under three hundred words. Actually, I just made that up, but my point stands – if points, which are one dimensional, can exhibit the properties of two dimensional phenomena. As if the complexity of his sentences isn’t enough to put mortal readers off, Joyce also throws in digressions, asides, culdesacs and all manner of verbal sleights of hand that, if I can put it this way, that transform what might be described, metaphorically, as the landscape into a dreamscape. Being a poor reader – I can’t read any faster than I speak – I was mightily frustrated and eventually gave the book to someone I didn’t like, saying, Here, this is right up your alley. And so it was. I heard peals of laughter coming from his room for months afterwards. I often wondered what the fruit tasted like. All the same, I knew from the enthusiasm of other people for the book, that it had to have something special going for it, so when the opportunity to listen to it, rather than read it, came my way, I was on – or in… or something – but definitely not out. Though I was about to be bowled over.

My first impression, as I listened, was that he (the voice of the book) wasn’t saying anything coherent at all. Words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs (you can tell I had a good primary education) tumbled out upon tumbled each other tumbled sonorously hypnotically tumbling teasing cuddling wobbling until tickled laughing heaven sent burst asunder. I kid you not. At first I wasn’t sure if it was safe to keep driving. The intoxication of apparent nonsense was intoxicating – absolutely! And that’s not a tautology or an oxymoron. Actually, I must tell you about the very first time I came across that word. I was on a ten day hike across the Three Passes Track in the Southern Alps of new Zealand, reading a book in which the word was used, and I …. oops, should I be doing this – oh what the heck…. anyway, I asked the team leader, What’s an oxymoron – team leaders, as you would expect, know things like that. He asked me if I had studied at Oxford. Not yet, I said. Well, he replied, When you do you will be. It took me a while. Now back to intoxication. The extraordinary thing about what I was hearing was that even though it made no sense at all, it was absolutely riveting. I couldn’t take my ears off it. After about half an hour the thought occurred to me that surely this could not go on for four whole discs. And if it did, surely it could not sustain my interest. But I was having too much fun to be bothered wondering sensible sensibilities sensibly. So I just splashed arrollinground diving and soarleaping gleegigglingfully at how sillythingsooth the sound of the words worth more than daffodils – or daffy dills, for that matter – were. Perhaps you get the picture. Oh, and by the way, it does go on in that vein (or simthing somilar)for four whole discs, praise be the morning and the evening and everything between in both directions.

Are you still with me? It was about half way through the second disc that the penny dropped - or was it an apple – and if an apple, the apple that Eve gave Adam, or Isaac Newton’s proof of gravity – or even the Surly Pom of Avignon – that what I was listening to was actually a SONG!! Let’s put it to the test. Toast and marmalade for tea Sailing ships upon the sea aren't lovelier than you All the games I see you play... Get my point? Only there’s a bit more to James Joyce than Tin Tin (you can tell I don’t like post-modernism). I mean, it did hold my attention for nine hours. Which led me to the conclusion that this is not just a song, but an EPIC song. You know, Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Beowulf, The Man from Snowy River. I kid you now. Another way of putting it might be that it is a cathedral rose window – perhaps in the style Miro or Dali rather than the medieval masters. In other words, it is not comprehended merely be reading or even hearing the words on the page.

There is a tradition called Bloom’s Day(16 June). Devotees gather in a pub in the very early hours, long before it is opened to the general public, and they begin reading Joyce’s Ulysses, taking turns and quaffing stout in between and almost certainly during; and they don’t stop until they have finished, long after the pub has closed. Change the venue. Change the Book. Change the epoch. And what have you got? The Hebrews gathered in a tent or the temple reading, nay, solemnly singing, Deuteronomy. This, I believe, is the way to attend Finnegan’s Wake. But not, surely, with the pious grimness of a reading of the Pentateuch. Indeed.

Go jollily. That’s what I always say – or would if I always said anything. It’s the meaning of life. And it’s what the Wake is about – I think. Just ask the laughing Buddha, or the man who “turned water into wine” – now there’s a story untold because told badly. As tribes gather to sing their continuity, or to contemplate the rose window of their cathedral, so gathers the tribe of Jolly to roll in the aisles, split their sides, laugh their heads off, die laughing, or, to put it simply, to express amusement by smiling and emitting loud inarticulate sounds. Well, compared with the figures of speech that preceded it, the dictionary definition of cachinnate is putting it simply. But I digress. The truly awesome thing about the Wake is that it gets as close as possible to being inarticulate sounds without actually being inarticulate at all, in any way, or anything like it – to put not too fine a point on it, if you get what I mean, or not. The words, most of them, are know to everyone. They have meanings. But the complexity of the sentences requires heroic concentration to retain the point that is being made, a task made nearly impossible by attention the components – words, phrases clauses – draw to themselves because they are so amusing. While the result is not incoherence, it is might as well be, because the thrust of what is being said is deliberately concealed by unrelenting mirth – not unlike the way a dream presents familiar sights that don’t make any sense at all – especially if remembered awake. A wake!? Oh, awake!

Like a liturgy, recited repeatedly for a whole lifetime, gradually letting participants into mystery, the Wake may be the book we should be reading on Blooms Day. We should probably expect that even a heroic effort to grasp the point of each sentence will not be enough. For, in the end, even a complete grasp of what every sentence says may actually conceal what the Wake has to offer. I suspect this because after listening to the whole thing twice, I began a third listening, shutting out the amusement at the surface, concentrating on the flow in order to grasp whole sentences. And I succeeded for several minutes, only to notice the fractal properties of the Wake. The mirth that is immediately seen in the components of sentences reappears when the sense of what is being said in several sentences taken together is grasped. If this is so, I think that there is little point in heroic effort, for even if one grasped the whole book as a single wave form, the shape would be as it is at the surface. The point would seem to be, therefore, just to enjoy, but enjoy in company – as in a wake. And let the enjoyment carry you into what words alone cannot express. Deeper, deeper as you go, and when you reach the end start again, and again. I wonder…