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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Finnegans Wake

  
 
delacroix
22:16 / 16.02.07
Any 'lithers in NYC want to contact me about the possobility of a Finnegans Wake reading group? I'd love to start one--wonder if there's any interest from this board? That would be ideal, of course--been reading Campbell's "Skeleton Key", and have had a relationship with Joyce for a while, although that one novel has been more or less imprenetrable to me. I know I'm not alone. Mail me!
 
 
astrojax69
21:53 / 20.02.07
...and have had a relationship with Joyce for a while

umm, didn't joyce pass away some time ago? are you sure he's not seeing anyone else on the side now?? that sure is complicated!
 
 
This Sunday
20:31 / 22.03.07
I'm soon to be on the entirely other side of the country, however, I just this morning grabbed my copy of the Wake to have something to read during the uncertain waiting moments of the day.

Some suggestions: read the 'Skeleton Key' but realize it skips/avoids a lot, misinterprets some things, and generally tries to erase all sex or magicky stuff from the book. Makes it easier for middle-class digestion or something, I suppose, but it does take some teeth and some fun out of it. Primarily, trust your instincts. It's a big sea, y'know, and you've got to just splash around, jump in, and dive about or lay on the surface bobbing around while the sun chars your very peaceful flesh and then you wake up and almost drown. Right.

Joyce intended the book to have, literally, magickal properties, so that it is impossible to not derive meaning from it, to misinterpret, though it is possible to miss all the meaning and thereby get a wonky picture off it.

It's my favorite childhood book, perhaps, and I often think the less preconceptions, the less exterior analyses one is filled with, the easier it is to pull substance and understanding from it. Although, as a kid with very little understanding of many languages, I did assume for quite some time that he tapped his nipple in the tub to precognate. Make of that what you will.

It requires you to trust your interpretations, your own gleaning, though. You cannot self-edit; wipe your glosses of what you know. Joyce has relinquished any security on it, by being dead, putting it into publication, and letting the thing adrift.

When you get there, or through, or somewhere in it, though, if you could give some thought to Issy being the third - and reconciling - son, let me know what you think of the idea. I'm almost sold on it, but it's an idea I've yet to see one actual scholar mention. Anywhere. Which annoys me. Could be I just like her better than her brothers, dad, or Kate and Anna.
 
 
Jack Fear
00:07 / 23.03.07
Joyce intended the book to have, literally, magickal properties

Evidence for this, please? And a throwaway line in some Robert Anton Wilson book DOES NOT COUNT: something from Joyce's correspondence or a reminiscence from one of his intimates will do nicely, thanks.
 
 
matthew.
02:27 / 23.03.07
He didn't intend to have magical properties in the book. He wanted to have a reading experience where you would start the book in one sitting and finish in one sitting, lean back and say, "Hey, I need to start all over again". The book is supposed to be ourobouros.

Joyce wanted the book to be the ultimate Joyce book, the one he would want to read: multilingual puns, complex references to other sources, and themes and characters dealing with the lowest of the low and the highest of the high. He wanted to find high art in the lowest places. That's why (for example), one of the key moments in Stephen Dedalus' life is being pushed into the muck and shit (literally) and being sick for two weeks.

The title is even a pun: Finnegan's wake is a funeral. Also, Finnegan is awake. Joyce was a big fan of puns and language and the power of words, but he was interested it in the way that an engineer wants to break something down and rebuild it.

It's not about magick. It's about everything between heaven and hell.

(Sorry about the length of this post... last year I completed a year long course on Joyce and I've read a lot about the man... as much as I've read by the man)
 
 
All Acting Regiment
08:35 / 23.03.07
Super book, but I haven't properly read it...my pal in publishing is dealing with a Joycean scholar at the moment. Quite a unique bunch, Joyceans.
 
 
This Sunday
19:02 / 23.03.07
In defense of the magick: Somebody's part (possibly WCWilliams') of 'Our Exagmination Roung His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress' mentions it, as well as the appearance of an anecdote from a small brown book on Joyce's use of structure by a man named, I believe, Tindall (or Tindam, Tyndel...) which appears to be legit, despite being part of a 'scholarly' series on various authors, written sometime in the late seventies, in regards to first Joyce laying out for a group of friends the magick intent, then getting upset with one of them for 'misreading' or not reading deep enough into a section, which then allows the author of this thin brown-covered book (sketch of Joyce in line-art on cover) to dismiss the whole thing as either (a) a joke, or (b) proof that sometimes geniuses are a little loopy and we must humor them and then move on to the quantifiable analytical elements of their brilliant work. He does that a lot, I'm afraid, and in general it's a poor book for the analysis, but I was impressed by the footnotes, which appear comprehensive in a way that makes the elements presented hold weight if not the specious suspicions of the collector/analyzer.

(Does anyone have any idea what book I'm talking about? I have a shit memory and gave it to a student last year for a paper they were writing: I'll never see that copy again.)

Further note towards Joyce's belief in magick and in his and everybody else's capacity to work some, see the published letters collected by a friend of his, post him being dead, then willed, presumably, elsewhere and finally put to print. Also contains the letters regarding getting his (then not) wife to admit she masturbated, which is not necessarily the thing I'd write to a pal, but so be it.

This was a man who would burst into furiously absurd laughter in the middle of the night because of something he'd just put down on paper. He jerked off over certain passages of the Wake and then noted the date and time in notebook. And then there's the whole 'write his life and children better'/heal the world thing, which I don't buy at all, but would be, indeed, a magickal act in the offing, were it true.

It's the sort of thing that is entirely ignorable in a reading, however. Because it can be, as Burgess did with Joyce's actual life, a thing to look at as the trick of perspective, rather than 'real magick' or something. Some people are disatisfied until there's fiery rain lapping at the indoor walls of a major metro hotel, while others are ready to identify it in the smile of a kid on a random streetcorner.

Mouther of God have mastic on us all!
 
 
This Sunday
19:32 / 23.03.07
I will clarify that I am not a scholar. At all. Despite lying and fictive appearances. And it doesn't bother me what religious or political affectations Joyce took on, any more than it hurts to admit the Catholic aspects of Graham Greene novels or the psychosexual philosophies of Charles Lamb, Andrea Dworkin, or Mike Moorcock.

Again, 'wipe your glosses': do or be damned. Remember that Joyce spent a lot of time writing/drafting explanatory notes to benefactors and funders, that are clearly, if not inaccurate, than misleading, such as assuring certain people they were not funding something that had any sort of sexual or religious content. At all. Maybe he was just fucking about when he mentioned magick. Maybe PKDick and Graham Greene were goofing off, on similar terms, with the surprise miracle addendum or the liberal sprinkling of highly symbolic elements. Maybe Durrell didn't think there was anything to individual perspective and all that nonsense about drafting in four dimensions a narrative that rotates and breaks and makes fools of sexually-wounded paranoids, authors, and depressed young dancers was all for a laugh. It doesn't stop it from being read into the work once posed, and unlike many authors, Joyce actively encouraged this 'looking through your own lens' approach, which, when 'magic' or 'love' or 'God' or 'Viconian' are introduced, even fleetingly as a chicken scratching the allaphbet in the dirt of time, they either hit that lens and stick like film in a wire-mesh, or pass through and are dismissed as not part of the sample you're taking.

And I'll disagree that 'Finnegans Wake' should be read end to end and then re-read that way. Read it once like that, if you must, but really, it's a stream, a sea, a communication between a mountain and a river (as Joyce himself described it) and therefore is probably better treated as a map or territory. You do not look at every point on the map in sequence, but find where you are and where you are going and trace a route. You walk into town and don't necessarily have to cover every inch, but breeze through with intent or wandering, place to place, as amuses. If the Wake does not amuse, then, in my opinion, and only then, has there been a failing.
 
 
This Sunday
19:38 / 23.03.07
Quick and then I'm shutting up (all sighs of relief, please hold til I'm done): "It's not about magick. It's about everything between heaven and hell."

Wait. Heaven. But no magick. Hell. But for fuck's sake no magic, please. And... everything between. But let's not have magick enter this highly religious and wholly mystical and massive absorption of all things under the sun, past it, and deep within its fiery flaming nuclear reactor superdense heart. Oh my stars and body!

I know that's snippy, but really! You do enjoy the world more than that statement makes it appear, I hope.
 
 
Organic Resident
23:41 / 23.03.07
I bought my copy in the late 1980s and read it in 1990 during a period of lengthy convalesence after an operation and a number of false starts. My key to reading it was to 'read' it as you would pronounce words in an Irish accent. Whether Joyce meant it as a magical text, I don't know, unless you think of his use of puns, allusions etc as magical, which is possible.
I read it again in the mid 1990s during a period of (voluntary) unemployment and enjoyed it more and got a lot more out of it. A couple of years ago, I had to go into hospotal in East London (UK) for another operation and mindful of the noise in NHS wards, bought a portable cd player beforehand and a copy of the Naxos audio version. This was already a strange period of my life, as my mother had died 2 weeks before and I was being made redundant from my job a few week's later. But none of this compared to the surrealism of listening to it on cd in the middle of the night while a drug dealer on my ward threatened people via mobile, someone else was playing loud techno and another person was trawling the beds trying to buy prescription drugs off patients.
In that setting, FW seemed quite tame.
 
  
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