From the archives: a baffled review of Finnegans Wake.
It’s very funny reading. I love how he says that this is a book where “all is considered”.
That’s pretty much the size of it.
And listen to THIS language:
“In twenty years’ time, with sufficient study and with the aid of the commentary that will doubtless arise, one might be ready for an attempt to appraise it.”
There was a great story in The Boston Globe recently (found it!!) about a group of people who get together once a week – at a pub, of course – and discuss Finnegans Wake
I read Finnegans Wake in … I’ll have to check the date … I think it was 1998. It was a year when I was, to put it mildly, not doing well. I needed a big CHALLENGE to take my mind off my problems. I took out Finnegans Wake and – like my dad suggested – I read it out loud.
Believe it or not, the book makes total sense when read out loud. Or – not TOTAL sense, maybe – but it seems like it’s meant to be spoken. You hear the connections, the onomotopeia, the alliteration – and although it appears to be a made-up language, it is not gibberish, and there is, also, a narrative there.
That reviewer, baffled as he was, hits the nail on the head when he writes:
What he is attempting, I imagine, is to employ language as a new medium, breaking down all grammatical usages, all time space values, all ordinary conceptions of context. Compared with this, Ulysses is a first-form primer.
Reminds me of that great quote from Nora Joyce, Jimmy’s wife – the one he wrote Ulysses in honor of. (Imagine having arguably the greatest book of the 20th century – the book that, in TS Eliot’s words “killed the 19th century” – be written to commemorate the day YOU came into the author’s life. Uhm – thanks?) But anyway – Finnegans Wake was his crazy follow-up to Ulysses – it took him 17 years to “finish” it – and even as he sent it to the publisher, he was changing stuff, rearranging things, adding commas, subtracting commas.
Ulysses, often described as “difficult”, was a cakewalk compared to Finnegans Wake – which went into language in a way nobody else had before. Or – who did – Chaucer, maybe? I mean, it was THAT much of a revolution!!
Nora – who was considered by many of Jimmy’s literati friends – to be semi-illiterate – an earthy girl who didn’t “get” his work, said, long after his death: “Everyone is always askin’ me about Ulysses. Finnegans Wake is the really important book.”
Here’s the original 1939 review. Love it!
Dude, I absolutely LOVE that “from the archives” feature in the Guardian. You stumble across some really cool old stories.
I am not even aware of it – really??? I’ll have to bookmark it.
Yeah, somewhere from their main site, they feature an old story from way back whenever, I’m pretty sure on a daily basis. Sometimes it’s a review or a feature on a major news event, etc. But it’s really cool.
you’ll “have to check the date” when you read Finnegan’s Wake? You actually keep track of when you read books? I just plow through them and forego the record keeping. :)
Tim – yeah, I write down the titles of all the books I read and what year I wrote them.
I meant “check the date” in my head – it was a terrible 2 years, so bad that 1998 and 1999 always blend together in my mind – so I’m not sure which year it was.
Not that it matters.
I, too, read Finnegan’s Wake aloud to myself. When and where? In my car while waiting for my Little Leaguers to arrive for practice. For the sake of the reading, I arrived an hour early to each practice. It took an entire season to finish. And, yes, you can hear the music easier when you’re spouting it out loud. And, yes, there were strange looks from innocent strangers passing by.
Steve on the mountain
I knew instantly this post had to be about Finnegan’s Wake. Gads, what a chore. It takes some kind of gall to inflict that on people!
A fiction writer friend of mine kept that book on the back of his toilet for bathroom reading. He figured he would read two pages a day – not caring what he understood and what he didn’t – until he could finally brag that he read the whole thing. He finally read the whole thing. And he didn’t have anything to say about it except “it’s great bathroom reading.” This from the best prose stylist I know.
Well, Michael, I’m with Jimmy’s wife. And I couldn’t be a larger Joyce fan if you paid me. But I’m with her when she says, “Finnegans Wake is the really important book.”
You say it takes gall? I say it takes genius. Joyce had both.