“O tell me all about Anna Livia!

I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You’ll die when you hear.”

— Finnegans Wake, James Joyce

A wonderful post from one of my favorite bloggers about Finnegans Wake, which he calls “one of history’s freakish cul-de-sacs”, (I love that).

Like Patrick, I have read Finnegans Wake – in increments – and mainly outloud to myself. In my opinion, it reads much better out loud – you can hear it – because Joyce, being nearly blind himself, was mostly all about the sound of things. He experienced the world not visually, but aurally … and the music of Finnegans Wake, because that is what it is, is in what it sounds like.

I was in grad school, a rigorous environment already – and I found, while I was in school, that I only gravitated towards mostly difficult works. My brain was used to difficulty (and I’ve never been one who thinks “it’s an easy book” is the highest of compliments anyway) so while I was in school, and already tremendously strapped for time, I found myself reading difficult things like Leviathan and Antonin Artaud (Artaud? I need you to CHILLAX, okay? You’re freaking me out. Just CHILLAX) and Finnegans Wake. If it wasn’t rigorous, it didn’t hold my interest at that time. Finnegans Wake was not a book I carried around with me, reading while I was in line at the bank. It didn’t seem to lend itself to that kind of behavior, so typical for me with other books. I couldn’t just pick it up and put it down again. I needed to clear a space for it, intellectually, and I did so every morning for about half an hour at a time.

Then, as now, I was a morning creature – waking up at 5:30 a.m. to have quiet alone time before charging off to school where I would be busy until 11 o’clock at night, with barely time to grab a granola bar for lunch. I would sit on the couch in the living room, and read out loud to myself (quietly, because I had a roommate) – drinking my coffee – and sometimes taking notes, underlining things that struck me. I could only do a couple of pages a day. That was fine for me. I felt no pressure. I didn’t try to read it like a regular book.

I had, of course, already read all of Joyce’s other stuff – multiple times – “The Dead” is a story I go back to time and time again (I consider it to be that rarity: a truly perfect thing) – (excerpt and essay about it here) … not to mention certain sections of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (excerpt and essay here) – and my reading experience of Ulysses, one summer, under the tutelage of my dad, is one of the most memorable and exciting reading experiences I have ever had, rivaled only by my first re-reading of Moby-Dick, 15 years after I had first read it (and hated it) in high school.

There is always a ‘code’ in Joyce, he loved codes and symbols and secret messages – and while there is always much for me to learn with Ulysses, that first time, with the help of my dad, I cracked the code. I got it. Once I could see what he was doing, it was seriously like Alice in Wonderland going through the magic locked door into the Queen’s garden of roses. Not that the language is that opaque, it’s really not – certainly it’s not the mysterious dreamspace language of Finnegans Wake – but it’s way more fun to figure out what Joyce was attempting so that you can then just relax, and stop struggling. (“The Oxen of the Sun” chapter in Ulysses is a perfect example of what I am talking about. It is, by far, the most difficult chapter of the book – with language that predicts Finnegans Wake – and it was the only time where I felt, within 1 or 2 pages, “Yeah, uh-huh, so I am obviously not QUALIFIED to read this.” And I still feel that way, to some degree – I am not a linguist, so I can’t say what Joyce is up to 9 times out of 10 – but with the help of my dad, I saw what Joyce was doing – and so it stopped being a foggy mystery, a wall of incomprehensible language – and suddenly became, oh, one of the most genius things I have ever read in my life. Not because it was difficult – but because it was complex and had an inner structure that I couldn’t really see until I adjusted my own vision. I was really pleased when I received an email from a graduate student in Ireland, telling me that he had tripped over my post about the “Oxen of the Sun” episode, and it had really helped him crack the code for himself. I MUST give the props to my dad for that, because he was a big reason why I could figure it out. “Okay, so that’s a chapter about birth. So look for nine sections … everything’s about NINE in that chapter…” etc.)

Finnegans Wake (excerpt and essay here) makes Ulysses seem easy, like a dime-store novel. But to me, that is the fun of it. Ironically (or, not so ironically) Joyce considered it his most accessible book. Joyce did not worry about his audience (of course he didn’t – he went 17 years in between books!!) – but he felt that Finnegans Wake was almost populist in nature, made up of folklores, myths, oral history, legends … Anyone could understand it. (Of course “anyone”, at least in the Western world, was way more educated back then – Greek, Latin, all of that was par for the course in primary education … so the frame of reference was much larger). Nora (Joyce’s wife) looked at one of his pages of gobbledygook language and said, “Why can’t you write a book that people would want to read?”

However, she – a rough uneducated girl from Galway – said, after his death, when reporters continually brought up Ulysses to her:

“What’s all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book.”

I can’t say I enjoyed Finnegans Wake (although once I got into it I actually found the whole thing to be a hoot. Seriously. A HOOT.) Joyce famously said about Ulysses:

The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book — or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.

And you know, the more I read Joyce, the more I see what he was talking about. He obviously took his work seriously, agonizing over commas, and stuff like that … but regardless of his giant reputation in the canon of 20th century literature – and the shadow he casts forward and back … I always find there to be a silliness in his work, a lightness (this is actually not the case in The Dubliners, which feel like straight-up social realism to me – you can feel the influence of Ibsen there, Joyce’s favorite writer) … but I find the books to be ABOUT nothing. There is no “theme”, no “message” and if you try to pin it down you will certainly miss the whole of it. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are not their plots (thank God – because what the hell happens in those books??) … they are their language.

To quote Samuel Beckett, who had this to say about Finnegans Wake:

You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.

And once I surrendered, once I let JOYCE lead, and stop trying to lead the book myself … the language took over, filling my head with sounds and echoes and reverb … silly, juvenile, audacious, pointless – yet fun. Because it was fun for Joyce.

E.M. Forster gave a series of lectures on “the novel” and devoted a great deal of time to Melville’s Moby Dick. He closed his lecture with words I find appropriate for Joyce as well, and Finnegans Wake in particular:

Moby Dick is full of meanings: its meaning is a different problem. It is wrong to turn the Delight or the coffin into symbols, because even if the symbolism is correct, it silences the book. Nothing can be stated about Moby Dick except that it is a contest. The rest is song.

And speaking of song: Patrick also has a link to James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake.