Tag Archives: Far reading

What Makes Finnegans Wake Great?

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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.

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When Is a Man Not a Man?

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The beginning of Chapter I.7 — all about Shem the Penman — tells the brief story of Shem asking the “first riddle of the universe” to all of his brothers and sisters. The riddle is the title of this post, and it’s written in straightforward English there. The “brothron and sweestureens” take turns guessing, but none can get it right, so Shem has to tell them the answer: “When he is a […] Sham.”

This post looks at the riddle as it recurs throughout Finnegans Wake, considering what it implies about masculinity and art.

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The Qabalah in Finnegans Wake

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The Qabalah is a tradition popular in Western esotericism. It was originally a form of Jewish mysticism, dealing with the idea of God’s power “emanating” into creation in ways detailed in a diagram called the “Tree of Life,” a series of ten spheres (called “sephiroth”) that represent various concepts: they are arranged descending toward the sphere representing the physical universe. During the Renaissance, Hebrew Qabalah became an influence on Western Hermeticism, occultism, and “magick.” Ideas derived from the Hebrew system became combined with other esoteric ideas like astrology and tarot. Later occultists, including members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which W.B. Yeats was a member, engaged in “magical” practices that drew upon Qabalah, such as imagining spheres of light on the body corresponding to the sephiroth.

So what does any of this have to do with Finnegans Wake? There are several references to Qabalah and other occult topics in the novel, which Joyce likely learned about through his interest in Theosophy, a spiritual movement that blended a number of different beliefs and practices from all around the world. After losing faith in Catholicism, Joyce investigated other spiritual traditions like this, before more or less rejecting most of supernaturalism. I qualify that last sentence because the issue of what exactly Joyce personally believed, at various points in his life, is complicated, but we can be confident from his mocking references to Theosophy in Ulysses that by the time he wrote that novel, he did not accept it and found it at least kind of silly.

The most major Qabalistic reference in Finnegans Wake is the list of ten syllables running down page 308 in II.2, which I have discussed here.

This post will muse a little more about the relationship between Qabalah and the Wake, and I will even suggest that the Wake could function like a Qabalistic classification system and could be the basis of practices that are enriching to an individual. Belief in the supernatural is not necessary to view the Wake this way or to use these practices.

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