On this June 16th, in the middle of another read through Ulysses, I find myself thinking of two Joyce quotes about Finnegans Wake.

The first was reported by Czech writer and artist Adolf Hoffmeister, who met Joyce in 1930:

I am thinking of a beautiful book where each occasion, each situation and each word will choose its own language.

Joyce was of course thinking of the Wake here, but it applies to much of Ulysses as well. It’s notable that Joyce attributes agency to situations, and even to the medium of artistic expression: not only are form and content interconnected, the content shapes the form. An artist has to open himself to the material to achieve this feat, just as readers must open themselves to the text to engage it more fully.

An elaboration of this idea comes from a Joyce quote reported by Jan Parandowski, from 1937. I have quoted this before:

The few fragments which I have published have been enough to convince many critics that I have finally lost my mind, which by the way they have been predicting faithfully for many years. And perhaps it is madness to grind up words in order to extract their substance, or to graft them one onto another, to create crossbreeds and unknown variants, to open up unsuspected possibilities for these words, to marry sounds which were not usually joined together before, although they were meant for one another, to allow water to speak like water, birds to chirp in the words of birds, to liberate all sounds of rustling, breaking, arguing, shouting, cracking, whistling, creaking, gurgling – from their servile, contemptible role and to attach them to the feelers of expressions which grope for definitions of the undefined.

But the last time I quoted this, I omitted for some reason the final two sentences, which struck me strongly today:

I took literally Gautier’s dictum, “The inexpressible does not exist.” With this hash of sounds I am building the great myth of everyday life.

The “great myth of everyday life” describes Ulysses as well: the commonplace and the everyday partake of the grandeur communicated by myths and epics.

We might wonder whether Ulysses is poking fun at modernity (ironically likening trivial events to heroic deeds and suggesting that the modern world is a pale echo of a great past) or exalting it (sincerely suggesting that the commonplace and trivial have their own grandeur, expressing parts of a Great Story that has been expressed also in countless works of art throughout history).

In the spirit of Finnegans Wake, it is appropriate to say that the answer is both simultaneously, but I lean more toward the second option, which I think is thoroughly supported by the text of Ulysses (the description of Bloom as “unconquered hero” in “Sirens” comes to mind, along with his unique method of “slaying the suitors” in “Ithaca”).

But what interests me in Joyce’s quote above is that he’s describing Finnegans Wake. Perhaps even more so than Ulysses, Finnegans Wake is the book of the great myth of everyday life, a celebration of the idea that a Great Story s told and retold, in bits and pieces and aspects and revisions, through all art and especially all of our actions. Even the simplest and most trivial of actions summons resonances with the stories that speak to the human condition. Writing a blog post, for instance, is just another version of Shem taking ALP’s dictation for the Letter.

I was recently re-reading Colin MacCabe’s essay “An Introduction to Finnegans Wake” in James Joyce: New Perspectives, and he makes a point that has stayed with me. After establishing that Joyce’s work has always been focused on the “methods by which identity is produced in language” — citing the opening of Portrait as an example of how the identity given by the “paternal narrator” in the first sentence gives way to body, sound, and desire — MacCabe makes an important point about the Wake: “When Joyce claimed that in Finnegans Wake he was investigating a ‘great part of every human existence’ which escaped normal linguistic relations, he was not simply claiming to represent accurately a sleeping mind but rather to be investigating a vital dimension of our being which, although more evidenced in dreams, insists in our waking life as well.”

This is something I have always felt about the Wake: it is an attempt to put into words a certain wordless aspect of everyday consciousness. There is an ineffable quality to our direct experience, from which language and discursive thought too often distance us. Joyce’s strange experiments with language, defamiliarizing the medium through which we try to make sense of that experience, can help reconnect us to the experience, to what I’ve called “Selflessness” in other posts.

Happy Bloomsday! Whatever you do today, you are part of the Great Story.