Finnegans Wake

I love Finnegans Wake, but I had to read it more than once before I felt that way about it. I read it the first time because I heard it was perhaps the most difficult book to read that had ever been written, and I wanted to see if I could do it. It took me more than two years to read it the first time. I read it with the help of the Ronald McHugh book which takes Finnegans Wake line by line and defines foreign and obscure words. I hoped that this would help me understand the book as a whole. It didn't. There were parts here and there I could make out and puns I could enjoy, but I felt hopelessly lost and decided to have nothing more to do with the book once I had finished it. However, I could not get Finnegans Wake out of my mind and decided to tackle it again a few years later. Even though there was more that I understood then than I did the first time I read it, it was still a struggle and it appeared that it would take me as long to finish it the second time as it did the first. One night as I was reading it in a state between being awake and asleep, I started dreaming. As it usually happened, my dreams jumped around from one thing to another with no logic at all. I found myself talking with others in the dream but did not understand the gist of the conversation I was having. I understood the words, but they didn't seem to be connected to each other. As I went in and out of this half awake and half dream state, I thought that dreaming was a lot like reading Finnegans Wake and that reading Finnegans Wake was a lot like dreaming. At that point I completely woke up and realized that my approach to reading the book could not have been more wrong headed. Instead of trying to understand every word and paragraph, I needed to go with the flow and read steadily without stopping. If I understood something, I was happy. If I didn't understand, so what? I kept on going. I found myself laughing at the puns and enjoying the sounds of the words. I finished the last one hundred pages in only few days. In fact, it was hard for me to put the book down even when I had other things to do. It took me only a week and a half to read it the third time, but I got far more out of it that time than I did out of the other two times put together, mainly because I didn't try to get anything out of it! I am now reading it for the fifth time and will continue to read it off and on for the rest of my life. Do I now understand the whole book? No! I probably only understand between one fifth or one sixth of it, but that is enough to hold my interest as I read. Sometimes I encounter sentences made up of foreign words or made up words that I cannnot understand at all. Then I will read a page that I can completely understand. My comprehension of what is said and what is going on fades in and out as I read just as it does when I dream, but every time I read it I pick up on things that I missed during previous readings. Instead of it being a struggle to read Finnegans Wake as it was the first time I tackled it, I now read it because I enjoy it.

I read Finnegans Wake with the idea that it was, as Joyce said, the "night" to Ulysses' "day", and that therefore it would somehow be based on a classical counterpart which could be read as the night to the Odyssey's day. I took that to be the Oresteia, because Aeschylus' trilogy contains the other, darker homecoming story of the heroes of the Trojan War, and the more night-like, interior (inside the palace, inside the city) consequences of the adventures out in the exterior world found in the Odyssey and the Iliad.Ulysses closely follows the books of the Odyssey, so it is always clear which episode corresponds to what book. Finnegans Wake with its four Books and its first sentence that completes its last sentence does not have anything like the structure of 3 Greek tragedies. The imagery and language in Finnegans Wake are so diverting, and the things they reference so wide-ranging, I really couldn't see how the first two Books could be related to the first two plays as I struggled through them.But FW's Book III has a much clearer correspondence with the scenes from the third play. It has three different inquests of the same character (Shawn, Jaun, Yawn) much as The Eumenides has Orestes' fate examined in three different settings. This did not spring into my mind until I started the third chapter with Yawn on the hill and thought of the Areopagus and the jury of Athenians, and then had a laugh looking back at the swarming school girls from St. Brides as stand-ins for the Furies in Athena's temple, with Jaun's lecture on proper behavior reminding me of Apollo's lame and blustery arguments against them. Shaun appearing out of the darkness and the voice that questions him in Chapelizod I hadn't recognized as particularly like the scene with the Pythia when I read it, but in retrospect his story, the Ondt and the Gracehoper, does highlight with those names the idea of someone looking for absolution as Orestes was in Delphi, and while the sort of involuntary way Shaun exits the scene is still puzzling me, I can see a parallel with Orestes' having to flee on. Also since the voice turns out to be his Sister Issy, a character who is more explicitly described as having become a nun later (in Chapter III.4) that makes her more Pythia-like back in Chapter III.1.So for The Eumenides and much of FW Book III, I could find correlations that were playful and let the FW chapters stand on their own like the ones in Ulysses, while giving a reason for the particular sequence of the scenes and their different settings. Had I just missed similar correlations in the first books? Apparently so. I never saw any other clear parallels until I had finished the whole book.In the very beginning of FW I could find passages that could be said to relate to lines from Aeschylus' watchman on the roof. Laboriously, I did look for these. Even the songs appeared where I'd expect them to, as the watchman speaks of singing to stay awake, but still there is no actual watchman in the beginning of FW. And the most bizarre, vivid and unforgettable image of all where Finnegan is laid out as a fish dinner has zero connection to any imagery at the start of the play. Only after a pass at reading the whole book did I see how (with a twist) I could relate the prologue of the Agamemnon to Finnegans Wake, but to all of the book, not just the first 13 pages.The twist I can best describe as Joyce playing a fanciful game of "What if?". It's not just "what if the watchman fell?" setting up the story of Finnegan and his fall. And it's not just "what if he didn't stay awake?" although with that twist, Joyce could turn Aeschylus' wakeful watchman into his own book's sleeping listener "Earwicker" (Earwicker and Porter have an etymological and a functional connection to "watchman" respectively.) It's the most fanciful "What if?" of all, and it comes from the watchman's parting comment, "if the house could take voice." What if the building really could speak? If buildings are actually going to be able to speak and tell us what is going on, then we get the structure of Finnegans Wake that I struggled to make sense of: a book in which different places, from historic landmarks like Howth Castle to the Porters' four ordinary bedroom walls, give us the sights and sounds they have been witness to. I had always noticed and liked the voice of the river in the Anna Livia Plurabel chapters, but I hadn't really considered how the voices of other places and natural features were speaking throughout the book.For my purposes, it is a lot simpler to match places and their storytelling task to the Oresteia's scenes than to cherry-pick through the text for passages that might. For instance, the old castle itself, not the four Old Masters plus Mute and Jute plus the Prankquean raconteur etc., makes the best parallel to the chorus of the old men of Argos. The old men remember the history of the beginning of the Trojan War; the castle remembers things it has seen and heard about its own history and the history of Dublin. Sometimes simply realizing it is a place that is speaking is really helpful to understanding what is going on. The idea that it's the walls' point of view in III.4 explains why we see the Porters' bedroom and their lovemaking four times from four different directions, and why we are sometimes looking into the room and sometimes out of it. I was completely confused by this, and even thinking the prurience was getting tiresome! Guessing that the domesticity of this chapter's setting paralleled the scene in the Eumenides where the Furies' roles are being redefined by Athena and scaled down to household and marriage concerns didn't help as much as understanding the walls themselves were defining what that chapter holds.So, does it really help in reading FW, to have the Oresteia in mind? It certainly did not help generally with understanding the prose. For me it was helpful overall to think that, instead of Joyce purely rambling in a dreamscape, going from scene to scene in a stream-of-conscious way, he had a chain of references for the order of the scenes, a reason for why particular settings were chosen for particular chapters. How big an impact this has on anyone else is more or less up to each reader, because it is so difficult to spot that taking it into account is entirely optional. I started with my guess that FW was based on the Oresteia, but I wasn't always convinced, and I am not sure even yet that I will ever grasp how each chapter fits.I have also come to think since finishing that the correspondence between FW and the Oresteia highlights a particular ontological reading of the Oresteia as much as the bare classic. In this reading the Agamemnon is considered Orestes' past and deals with what is known and thought about that past, The Libation Bearers is considered Orestes' movement toward his future and deals with him developing, and The Eumenides is Orestes' present, and deals with his relating to others around him and how he appears to them (how they judge him). Athena leading out a joyful procession at the very end is thought to be a moment of aspiration that makes a unity of this past, present and future. In FW Book IV we get the river reaching the sea, and I cannot begin to capture how that passage does it, but a sense of the unity of the whole book is definitely achieved.The philosophy that inspired this reading of the Oresteia would have been contemporaneous with Joyce, but who knows if he bothered with it? And who knows if the correlations that I described are really the product of a deliberate effort to work from the Oresteia? Joyce doesn't seem to have ever told anyone that he was basing his last work on another classic, when he made no secret of it with Ulysses. It wouldn't have made sense to mention when he was publishing excerpts, but he was open about the other works he was incorporating into the Wake both before and after he published the whole thing, so I have to believe that even if he did incorporate a structure from the Oresteia, he wanted his last work to stand alone. Which it certainly does.I have promised myself that I will reread it someday. But only if there is a group of us to share the journey. I couldn't have read it at all without the friends I read it with, and I wouldn't have missed sharing the experience with them for the world.

Likbfhbdsggxfhbjjdfvbkgbnhgscbjkddxvjdddg!! Viconian booms and the water of life. All wrapped up in a bite size novel. Highly recommended for reading during a train commute.

I don't think my life is long enough to give this book the close reading it deserves, but I'm enjoying the challenge of seeing how much I can understand. I would recommend it to obsessive compulsive freaks with a sense of humor.

A great rendering of excerpts from Finnegans Wake. The Amazon description does not make clear that this is a heavily abridged version of Joyce's work (about 109 pages from the book's 628 pages) on four CDs. There is an accompanying booklet with the text of the abridged portions being read and indications of where abridgments have been made. What is there is wonderful, just don't expect too much of it to be there.

Well, first, this particular edition. Begins on the very first page by telling us that Joyce was the oldest often (sic) children. Is this a typo, or are Penguin getting into the spirit of the book? Anyway, whatever, this is certainly the best book I have never read. I have managed the first page or two, but the reality is that I enjoy books ABOUT Finnegans Wake rather than actually attempting to wend my way through it. One book about it informed me that each sentence, even each single word, could be seen as a microcosm of the entire text, so in that context why actually read it all. "riverrun" is enough. Then again, the word play is very enjoyable and the ABC of the book, and a Lexicon, offer endless interest and much humour. Apparently Joyce was heard by his wife late into many a night as he laughed aloud at his own jokes, setting his traps for the future literary critics to decipher, writing yet another un-understandable book that the long suffering Nora Barnacle wished was more "understandable" and thus, perhaps, more of a cash cow. But as I grow older I see more clearly that understanding life is a terrible trap - as thoughts, words and beliefs congeal and enclose the mind in circles of self-justification as the inevitable end approaches. But what end? The end of Finnegans Wake (not that I have ever reached it) takes us back to the beginning. As Joyce said about Ulysses as he faced the obscenity trials, "if Ulysses is unfit to read, then life is unfit to live". So life is to be lived rather than "understood". And Molly Bloom, in Ulysses, ends her monologue with a beautiful "Yes". Learning about Finnegans Wake, from various books, does help me to live, hopefully with compassion and not a little gratitude. Not least for the life and writings of James Joyce himself who gave us this last wonderful book with eyes that just might have reduced many others to night, darkness and despair. So buy a copy, if not to read it, then to have it on your bookshelf to impress the neighbours.Absintheminded? Absent, mind drifting? Forgetful? Drunk? Or just a joke, all things, or nothing. Dig deep or skim the surface.

If you are a Joyce fan and yearn to read all his work, then I advise you to take an "easier" option with FW. Still an unusual read but it can at least be done.

Could not understand it

Finnegan`s Wake was the way Joyce found to cock a snook at the literary establishments of Ireland and England after his Ulysses was banned.It is impossible to describe this ocean of words where every phrase is a pun or a parody of church services or a reference to what seems like very other work of literature in the Classical or modern worlds.Buy it! Dive in. Be befuddled and amazed.

Was reaquainting myself with the book which I had never managed to get through as a girl.I think the best thing to do is to just dip in to it and not try and take it straight through!It then becomes extremely rewarding for my money.