Finnegans Wake is James Joyce’s masterpiece. The product of 17 years of labor, this book constitutes a tremendous language experiment that attempts, in some sense, to replicate on the page the experience of dreaming. Like a dream, the Wake is endlessly interpretable, disclosing fascinating revelations about its dreamer and, through him, about the human experience (since its dreamer is an “everyman” who signifies all of us).

But also like many dreams, the Wake appears on the surface to be rambling nonsense that makes little conscious sense. It has therefore acquired a reputation as one of the most difficult works of literature since it is not written in a standard language that our minds can easily grasp.

People unacquainted with the Wake often think I’m exaggerating about the book’s difficulties. After I spoke highly of the book to one friend, she downloaded an etext to read it for herself and reported that she thought at first that she had acquired a corrupted file because it was full of gibberish words composed of seemingly random letters. The file was not, in fact, corrupted. Those gibberish words were Finnegans Wake.

Here’s a sample from the beginning of the text to illustrate the bizarre nature of its prose:

What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishy-gods! Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax! Ualu Ualu Ualu! Quaouauh! Where the Baddelaries partisans are still out to mathmaster Malachus Micgranes and the Verdons catapelting the camibalistics out of the Whoyteboyce of Hoodie Head. Assiegates and boomeringstroms. Sod’s brood, be me fear! Sanglorians, save! Arms apeal with larms, appalling. Killykillkilly: a toll, a toll.

And on it goes like this for 628 pages.

As this brief sample might suggest, many readers have found Finnegans Wake to be “unreadable.” Indeed, some have even thought the book is a kind of practical joke. Joyce’s friend Oliver Goggerty called the book “the greatest leg-pull in all of literature.”

It seems very doubtful that Joyce intended the book as a joke, though. It’s difficult to imagine that he would have spent so much of his time on a mere joke, especially at the expense of alienating many of his supporters.

Joyce lyrically spoke of the book as “freeing” language from the constraints normally put upon it.

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.

It’s certainly true that the Wake raises questions about what it means to “read” a text, as well as about what the reader’s role is (or should be) in relation to a literary text. Engaging with the Wake is not an experience of passively pulling in information. “Reading” becomes a ferociously active process. People entering the Wake will find themselves reading passages out loud to hear puns that aren’t obvious from merely looking at the words; drawing connections between passages hundreds of pages apart that echo each other’s language (and transform that language in unexpected ways); piecing together information about the “real world” of the dreamer’s life that “exists” fictionally outside of this dream, as well as about the relationships of the dream characters; speculating about how the dream characters represent aspects of the dreamer, as well as how they represent aspects of history and even the everyday experience of each of us; and turning over phrases from the book in their minds during everyday life to find new connections and meanings.

The book is a complex web of associations whose meanings becoming clearer and more significant the more a reader explores the book and makes connections to his or her own life, to human experience, to literary history, and to world history.

Someone could object that this process is like pareidolia, the mind’s tendency to find patterns even when those patterns don’t actually exist, like seeing a face in the clouds. But a careful study of the book reveals a structure and (dream) logic that are not merely invented by the reader, a structure that rewards multiple readings and careful thought.

I first read Finnegans Wake sixteen years ago in grad school. Like most of its readers, I studied it with guidebooks and slowly worked my way through it. I found the book brilliant but tiresome. After about four chapters, I had had my fill: it was exhausting me with how much meaning was packed into every sentence (into every word). But at that point, only four chapters in, most of the book still lay in front of me! I plowed on to the powerful ending of Book I. Book II, whose language was even denser and more confusing, was a challenge. I started skimming through passages. Book III – concerning the exploits of “Shaun the Postman” – was rather boring to me. At this point in my first read, I really started skimming and just running my eye over all the words, whether or not I had a clue what was happening, just to say I “finished” the damn thing in one sense or another. After I got to the end of Book IV, the marvelous and lyrical ending of the entire work (which is simultaneously its beginning because it ends in the middle of a sentence that wraps around to the opening fragment of the book), I was done. It was brilliant, but I wasn’t going to read it again anytime soon. I think I dimly sensed that someone could spend many lifetimes exploring everything the book had to offer.

In the spring of 2020, I pulled Finnegans Wake off my shelf and decided to make it my quarantine project to read it again. This time, I would go even more slowly, and I would underline key words in each passage and take notes in the margins. Why not? I had all the time in the world.

This second reading was eye-opening. Since I had already been through the text once, and had some idea of what the general shape of the novel was, it became far easier for me to spot connections. The margins started filling up with references to other page numbers. By the time I completed my third read later in 2020, I was making sense of things that had always baffled me about the book. By the time I was making my way through the text a fourth time in 2021, I was keeping a running list of recurring themes that I could trace through multiple passages.

I described the process as the book “opening” itself to me. It felt like the first time through, I was gaining a view of the broad strokes of the landscape, and with each successive read I was exploring the terrain more fully.

This blog documents some of the insights I had while reading Finnegans Wake. Many of its posts began life as emails that I wrote to friends (particularly to Lindsay Weinberg, who is now the helpful and dutiful editor of this project) describing my insights, and I thank them for letting me ramble on and on in ways that perhaps sometimes bored them to tears.

I have no official plans or schedules for updates of this blog. It’s just a place for me to write my thoughts about the Wake. I will be relatively casual and straightforward. My goal is to provide accessible commentary on the Wake that might prove useful to others who attempt the book.