Like an ancient mystical text (The Zohar) or visionary art works (William Blake’s large-scale prophetic works), critics, specialists, and readers alike will be parsing and dissecting the work for years to come. Meanings literally flood from the book, a logorrheaic gushing, and a smack to the face for those seeking to master a text. The Wake represents a gleeful effrontery against the reader’s desire to be told what a passage means. Even within this sentence, chosen at random, meanings abound. Not sure what Joyce meant either, although ghazometron sounds like a mashup of Arabic and Hebrew (ghazal = the poetic form + metron … could be based on Metatron the angel and/or the word metronome, the device that keeps the beat).
Man looking round, beastly expression, fishy eyes, paralleliped homoplatts, ghazometron pondus, exhibits rage.” This circular form reinforces the works character as polyvocal, polysemic, and polymorphous. (Something I picked up reading Anthony Burgess and watching Monty Python.)Ĭonceived in a circular form – the last sentence of the novel begins the first sentence at the beginning of the novel – allows the reader to pick up and leave at any point. The only real prerequisite for reading the Wake is a love for language. I’m a bit of a language nerd, collecting foreign language dictionaries, slang dictionaries, subculture- and/or industry-specific dictionaries (gay slang, soldier slang, etc.). As noted Joyce scholar John Bishop states in the Penguin edition, “There is no agreement as to what Finnegans Wake is about, whether or not it is ‘about’ anything, or even whether it is, in any ordinary sense of the word, ‘readable’.” Perhaps reading the Wake isn’t about “getting it.” Without resorting to the trope, “All art is incomprehensible,” Bishop asserts the rather obvious point that the text will mean different things to different people. Unlike my reading of Ulysses – a version heavily annotated – I decided to read the Wake without any guides, skeletons, and such. A cornucopia of languages, puns, and parody, the Wake will probably never be fully understood, at least not in any conventional sense. It is a singular creative artifact, overflowing with meaning.
While the Wake is difficult, this shouldn’t be seen as a deterrent to actually reading it.
Like The Cantos by Ezra Pound, it is a text many know, few read, and less understand. This year I decided to read Finnegans Wake, a novel notorious for its inaccessibility. Earlier in my life, I read Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, all by James Joyce.
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