Over the last decade, I have been adamant that a necessary part of education is instruction in grammar: it is the very structure of thought. What people often overlook, especially in an age of “AI” slop, is that writing is not just a delivery system for ideas but a tool for generating and refining thought. The process of writing — and particularly revising drafts — helps writers sharpen their own ideas. And a working knowledge of grammar greatly aids in that process.

One point I made on the “How to Read Finnegans Wake“ page is that even though the vocabulary of the book is obscure, the structure of its sentences, their grammar, can be a guide to understanding it.

This post comes from notes that I wrote years ago on my third read of the book, where the grammar of a passage helped me to grasp its meaning.

Here’s the excerpt, which is a single grammatical sentence:

Landloughed by his neaghboormistress and perpetrified in his offsprung, sabes and suckers, the moaning pipers could tell him to his faceback, the louthly one whose loab we are devorers of, how butt for his hold halibutt, or her to her pudor puff, the lipalip one whose libe we drink at, how biff for her tiddywink of a windfall, our breed and washer givers, there would not be a holey spier on the town nor a vestal flouting in the dock, nay to make plein avowels, nor a yew nor an eye to play cash cash in Novo Nilbud by swamplight nor a’ toole o’ tall o’ toll and noddy hint to the convaynience.

The first few times through, that was utter nonsense to me.

But this time, I read not the words but the form: I figured out where the subject and verb are and the function of all the pieces. It does work as a coherent grammatical sentence.

The subject is “pipers”

The subject/verb group is “pipers could tell”

What could they tell?

Indirect Objects: They could tell “him to his faceback” and “her to her pudor puff”

[Joyce is mixing “tell it to his face” with “talk behind his back”…the gossip about HCE…I don’t know what a pudor puff is (powderpuff, like for makeup?), but you don’t have to know…they could tell it to him to his face or tell it to her to her X, whatever X is]

Direct Objects: They could tell them “how butt for his hold halibutt…” and “how biff for her tiddywink of a windfall…”

These are the beginnings of clauses that are what the pipers could tell. And both clauses (dependent clauses starting with “how”) begin with the construction “but for” — as in, if it weren’t for….

So, the pipers could tell HCE and ALP, to their face or behind their back or to whatever, how if it weren’t for his butt (his handsome halibut fish that he held, like Finn MacCool’s salmon of knowledge) or her windfall (I assumed “tiddywink” is a dirty joke pertaining to her body)……..

there would not be a holey spier on the town nor a vestal flouting in the dock, nay to make plein avowels, nor a yew nor an eye to play cash cash in Novo Nilbud by swamplight nor a’ toole o’ tall o’ toll and noddy hint to the convaynience.

There wouldn’t be anything! Not an I or a you, or buildings in the town or ships in port.

It’s because of HCE and ALP — the Cosmic Father and Mother — that we have all of this existence (and the alphabet, with its vowels…I and U…the gift of speech, the ability to make avowals/vowels) . The Fall produced this wonderful world of experience.

And now if you look back, you’ll see that HCE is described in an aside (enclosed by commas) as the “louthly one whose loab we are devorers of,” and ALP is described as the “lipalip one whose libe we drink at.” This is a description of the Father and Mother as cosmic meal. Food and drink. 

They are the egg of 0 broken into the feast of existence.

It’s a really cool sentence, and the best part is that this explanation I’m giving doesn’t at all capture all of its meanings and artistry.

There’s plenty more to find in just this one passage. For example, it was only on a later reading that I saw “cash cash” as a reference to the Shem-Shaun conflict that starts in I.6 with the time-space/dime-cash/cash-cash stuff. Here, it might mean “catch catch” (games of catch or hide and go seek, in the fallen world of the torments of love and jealousy? Conceived as a zero-sum game).

Anyway, my point is that all of this would be impossible for me to do if I didn’t know how to read the structure of a sentence.

This is an example of why inculcating grammar in students from a young age is important: it’s the structure of thought itself. If it can help a mind puzzle out Finnegans Wake, imagine how it can help people disentangle and refine their own thoughts through writing.