I’ve noticed significantly increased traffic to this blog in the last few days, most of which has been directed at my post James Joyce Created Star Wars.
Poking around the internet to find reasons for this, I’ve discovered that a British and Irish comedian named Jimmy Carr recently did an interview in which he gives his “hot take” on Star Wars, which is basically a version of the same argument I make there: that Star Wars descends from Finnegans Wake by way of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The thing that strikes me about the clip of the interview I saw, though, is that Carr says, “The greatest book in literature is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.” And when asked by the host why, he responds, “It’s incredibly difficult to read.”
I’m not sure if the interview was edited oddly there, or if he was building up to a better answer that I didn’t see, but as it stands, it sounds like he’s saying the thing that makes Finnegans Wake great is how difficult it is.
Whether he meant that or not, it’s an opinion that one sometimes encounters — the juvenile idea that the Wake‘s complexity or obscurity or difficulty is what makes it great.
Of course, this isn’t true at all.
Read on for some thoughts on what makes the Wake great, and for some thoughts on what the Wake has to say about this.
Alright, here it is: Finnegans Wake is a great work of literature not because it is difficult but because it compresses so much of the world’s history, literature, mythology, and wisdom into an original form that is fitted to the content so well that it performs that content effortlessly.
How’s that for a thesis?
I’m not even sure I would call the Wake difficult: the book opens itself readily to a patient reader and starts yielding treasures almost right away to someone disposed to work through it with just a little effort. And even before reaching that early stage, a reader can appreciate it, and get a lot from it, merely on the level of the aesthetic effects of the sounds — not unlike listening to a song in a foreign language that you do not speak. Far from being a difficult book, and/or a book you should be afraid of and that few people will make it through, Finnegans Wake is actually the ultimate text for a general audience, since all readers will be able to find something in it that speaks to them.
I’m tired of this idea that the Wake is somehow written in a kind of code that’s only for the super-duper intelligent. The people who talk this way about the Wake generally like to think of themselves as super intelligent…and think they’re so intelligent that they can recognize this otherworldly brilliance of the Wake. They also think — here comes the humble brag — they’re smart enough to recognize that the Wake is so far beyond even brilliant ol’ them….
Gimme a break.
The Wake is the perfect text to read out loud because the words perform the content. As Samuel Beckett puts it, Joyce doesn’t write about something…his words are the thing itself. Joyce doesn’t write about dancing — he writes passages where the words dance. He doesn’t write about sleep — he writes passages where the words fall asleep. And so on and so forth. All of the energy of the book is in the signifiers themselves, which are not so much pointing to a signified but acting out meaning by “playing” right there on the page as we read and in our voices as we declaim and in our communities of friends as we discuss — and in our consciousness as we turn over phrases from the book and let them tumble against the rest of the discourse in there.
It’s a playful book, it’s a fun book. It’s the book of humanity, of Here Comes Everybody.
*
What does the Wake itself have to say about its difficulty? We might consider a passage in I.5, which comments on the mysterious Letter that is a dream representation of the Wake itself. First of all, the narrator emphatically says that even though the Letter is confusing — even though “every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkery was moving and changing every part of the time,”
it is not a miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed: it only looks as like it as damn it
The text sure looks like a “riot of blots and blurs” and so on, but it’s not. It only seems like a confusing mess that is “miseffectual.” The choice of that word in place of “ineffectual” might emphasize the way that the text might seem to miss its mark. To someone who frames it as overly complex and confusing, the book doesn’t accomplish its goal.
Supposedly, Joyce’s wife said, looking over the proofs of Finnegans Wake, “Why don’t you write books people can read?”
Later, the narrator cautions us that such a view of the text can lead to readers feeling lost:
You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says: It is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out: Bethicket me for a stump of a beech if I have the poultriest notions what the farest he all means. Gee up, girly! The quad gospellers may own the targum but any of the Zingari shoolerim may pick a peck of kindlings yet from the sack of auld hensyne.
Someone who insists on the difficulty of this text might come to the conclusion that, pure and simple (puling sample), it’s an appalling (a puling) jumble of words. Such a person might be lost in the woods, and be unable to see the forest (farest) for the trees, and say, “I’ll be a son of a bitch if I have the paltriest notion what the text means.” Well, says the narrator, cheer up! Sure, the Four Old Men may have (or claim to have) the proper interpretations, but any wandering scholar can pick out some wisdom from this text. The narrator compares the text to a sack from which things may be plucked out. This recalls the nabsack of ALP (like that of Santa Claus) or the sack of Shaun the Postman.
That’s more or less the sense of this passage, which connects the energies of auld lang syne and the new year/new world of the children to the hen who digs up the Letter (“poultriest”), who is the equivalent of ALP delivering her gifts or Shaun the Post delivering the Letter to the next generation to start the story again.
The Wake might seem confusing, but fetishizing its “difficulty” is just going to lead to people needlessly feeling lost. The book is not an appalling jumble of words. It’s a sack of gifts. And it’s not a jumble but a “crossmess parzel,” as IV.1 puts it (Christmas parcel and crossword puzzle). It’s waiting for us to pick a peck of pickled peppers kindlings, to light the fire of our creativity wherein the story of humanity is born anew, as in the fire of the phoenix (in Phoenix Park).
*
Along similar lines, in Chapter I.1, Jute — an invader who manifests the extroverted or Shaunish side of HCE — complains that he cannot understand the native Irishman, Mutt (a more Shemmish figure). He “can beuraly forsstand a weird from sturk to finnic in such a patwhat as your rutterdamrotter.”
The patois or dialect makes him go what? It’s all a bunch of rot to him, but Jute unwittingly reveals that this language has the power of Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the gods, the end of the world. Jute can’t understand, or stand, a word of it because it’s so weird, and he considers it “Onheard of and umscene” — unheard of and obscene. That’s what people say about the Wake, alright. But “umsehen” is German for “look around,” and indeed, Mutt immediately invites Jute to do what readers of the Wake ought to: “Bussave a sec” — wait a second, and also save/redeem all of fallen time — “Walk a dun blink roundward this albutisle” — shut your eyes and see, like Stephen in Ulysses — and “Let erehim ruhmuhrmuhr,” let him hear, and Let Erin Remember the Days of Old (a song by Thomas Moore), listen/ear before him (erehim) for ehre (German for honor or glory) and ruhm (German for fame…sounds like Rome, too).
Through the sounds and sight of this language, he can, as the narrator of I.5 says, “keen again and begin again to make soundsense and sensesound kin again.” This line can be studied more in depth in this post, where I suggest that Shem and Shaun — the two sides of the dreamer, HCE — each “has a different mode of understanding literature and history and Finnegans Wake itself. By fusing them together, the reader can resurrect HCE in bringing the modes of the brothers’ activity into alignment.”
That kind of engagement with the text is much different from merely regarding it as an obscure and difficult text, a confusing jumble of words that is “Onheard of and umscene.” Indeed, that would missing the forest for the trees.
*
Now maybe this post has inadvertently convinced you that the Wake is in fact too difficult. Maybe I’ve therefore failed in my goal. But this post gives one example of the kinds of meanings I’ve discovered in the text after working with it for a while. Nothing I’ve done here is hard work or difficult — it’s all a variety of play, all a recognition that the Wake is, as I.5 says of the Letter, “as human a little story as paper could well carry.”
I encourage everyone to pick up a copy of the book and join in the fun. As the song says, There’s lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake.
