“Tim Finnegan’s Wake”

by David B. Lentz

When God reeled in good auld Tim Finnegan,

And looked into his green Irish peepers,

Said He, “Now, what was I thinkin’?

Poor lad, he ain’t one of the keepers.”

To hell Tim descended without any fear,

To the devil, whom not much is lost on,

Said he, “I’m sure you’ll be comfortable here,

Among all your old friends from South Boston.”

Tim’s jokes night and day caused Satan to swear,

As migraines crept behind blood red eyelids,

“An eternity with you is just too much to bear.

You’re going home to your wife and your nine kids.”

So up pops Tim at his wake from his casket.

“It can’t be,” went a howl from his wife.

When he belched the sea from his own breadbasket,

Said she, “Someone, hand me a knife.”

Now Tim’s fishing off George’s Banks,

Catching codfish, haddock and hake.

The happiest folk in town to give thanks,

Is John Hancock for Finnegan’s wake.

Finn’s now a legend among life underwriters,

In Beantown and all over the States.

In him beats the heart of a fighter.

Sad to hear how they increased his rates.

Finn’s tale is best told with a dram of Jameson.

You’re entitled to whatever sense you can make.

Just cause you’re dead, it don’t mean you’re gone.

You may take comfort in Finnegan’s wake.

from “Bloomsday: The Bostoniad”

A gorgon among books: many-headed, dreadful to behold, legendary, immortal.

It is a creature that seems to emerge from the depths of ancient mythology, captivating and terrifying readers all at once.

With its multiple heads, it represents the complexity and multiplicity of ideas that a great book can contain. Each head is like a different perspective, a different theme, waiting to be explored.

The dreadfulness of its appearance adds an element of mystery and danger, making the reader both intrigued and hesitant to approach. But like all legends, it has an allure that cannot be resisted.

And its immortality ensures that it will continue to be a source of inspiration and wonder for generations to come.

Whether it is a classic work of literature or a modern masterpiece, a book that is like a gorgon among books has the power to change lives and shape the way we see the world.

Well, let's be honest. I'll try not to hurt susceptibilities.

Did you like Joyce's Ulysses? Do you want more? So get around Finnegans Wake!

The object defies all summary; I renounce it. Suffice it to say that the work is deemed untranslatable, even illegible. Of course, we do not ask that of the genius, but it is clear that Joyce does not condescend to leave heaven to put himself a little at our level.

The burlesque and iconoclastic puns, which tear away a thin smile, the obscure literature references, the autobiographical clues - all this background confuses in long meandering prose (600 pages, ouch!). It inflicts a hermetic reading on us, abstruse and esoteric. The translator seemed tired of seeing the gradual scarcity of footnotes.

The text's meaning becomes clearer (weakly) during the last two parts, during illuminations that the author describes as "epiphany" and thanks to the periodic return of individual episodes. Such galimatias for such a sordid story!

If Joyce is a genius, he is the genius of bewilderment, the prospector of all literature. Finnegans Wake can only arouse the interest of eroded scholars (Damn, the Joycian demon is in me!) and exegetes of the work of the Irish author. For the others, there is no salvation. In evidence, to leave at the limit, to impress the bourgeois or shine in society. Avoid it if you don't want to drip reading (God forbid!) and find yourself after a post-libation depression ("never again!"). "Lasciate Ogni Speranza, voi ch'entrate" (Leave all hope, you who enter. Dante - Hell).

A lot of people tend to disregard Finnegans Wake as being incomprehensible. Some even get angry, as if the book has wronged them in some way. The text, being infinite as it is, demands that you abandon your notions of "mastering" it and accept that you will never fully understand it. However, with a bit of patience and perhaps the consultation of one or two resources, it's not overly difficult to truly engage with it.

In many respects, it is the book-length night to Ulysses's book-length day. It is filled with circularly infinite dreams of a "wake" that is both a funeral and an awakening, and drunken nightmares of a garbled Fall of Man as portrayed by Humpty Dumpty. Ulysses's polyphony transforms into the Wake's cacophony; the stream-of-consciousness becomes a "riverrun" of sub(un)consciousness.

Joyce doesn't quite create his own language, as is sometimes claimed, but he severely distorts the lexicon and the logic of English grammar, creating overlapping layers of suggestion and association typically only seen in experimental poetry. Finnegans Wake is infamous for its translingual puns, and it does have some hypercompressed polyglottal wordballs that required a great deal of scholarship to untangle. (And these subversions of the boundaries between languages are perhaps what led Phillippe Sollers to call Finnegans Wake the most formidable antifascist book.) But what interests me the most are its more subtle disruptions of language.

For example, take the word "amuzement", which appears approximately midway through the first (I) section. This relatively minor distortion of spelling gives us a word that is just an "a" away from "amazement" and just an "s" away from "amusement". It is both words simultaneously and yet not quite either word, a grand trifle that is actually nothing, but not just nothing, NOTHING. And in the midst of the absurd and horrifying levity of H.C.E.'s premature subaquatic burial, this seems to be the perfect nonword.

Here is a list of some of my favorite words in Finnegans Wake: plunderpussy, mammamuscles, astoneaged, alcoherently, gloompourers, vaguum, heavengendered, zozzymusses, quotatoes, oysterface, lumpsome, bulbubly, gushious, plultiply, fleshfettered, goosybone, sphoenix, bellyvoid, muddyhorsebroth, blowrious, evernasty, catacalamitumbling, gigscrew, psalmsobbing, piggiesknees, rhubarbarorum, frothwhiskered, flamefaces, eggburst, etceterogenious...

God bless your goobery little heart, James Joyce, for spending seventeen years creating the biggest mess in literary history and then allowing us all to get our grubby hands in it. In short, it's amuzing.

**"Finnegan’s Wake": A Bizarre and Captivating Literary Experience**

James Joyce's "Finnegan’s Wake" is a truly unique work that defies easy categorization. It can be seen as a masterpiece, a monstrosity, or a muddlement, depending on one's perspective.

The reading experience of this book is like no other. Reading genuine nonsense seriously allows the mind to let its guard down, and the unexpected becomes even more surprising. The imagination is awakened as one tries to piece together an understanding from the snippets of English among the gobbledygook.

Despite the initial bewilderment, closer attention reveals that the book seems to span various events, circumstances, and time periods. There are mentions of historical figures like Shackleton and Genghis Khan, and a wide range of events such as trials, deaths, marriages, and what appear to be insults.

The writing style and format are equally diverse, including poetry, music, and unconventional paragraphing. While the book is often incomprehensible, it can also be strangely entertaining. Joyce could perhaps have taken his own advice and been more straightforward, but that might have taken away from the book's unique charm.

The quotes and extracts from the book add to its allure. Some have a certain beauty in their descriptions, while others offer sage wisdom or creative insults. There are also things that simply amuse for no particular reason.

In conclusion, "Finnegan’s Wake" is a challenging but rewarding read. It forces the reader to think outside the box and question their assumptions about language and literature. Whether one loves it or hates it, there is no denying its impact and significance in the world of literature.

Why Finnegans Wake's Jokes Aren't Funny

This is an unusual review, an excerpt from a novel I'm working on. One character, Joachim, is sharing his thoughts on Joyce's Finnegans Wake with another, Samuel. Joachim has spent nearly thirty years engaged with this book.

He tells Samuel how he read the book obsessively, covering each page with notes, reading related materials like letters, introductions, summaries, and annotations. He even delved into Joyce's drafts, typescripts, and the Buffalo notebooks, which were written when Joyce was nearly blind and look like they were made by a bear with a crayon. He studied all of Joyce's thousands of made-up words, which were supposed to be jokes or amusements, but Joachim didn't find them funny. He saw the book as a huge mistake, taking Joyce seventeen years to write only six hundred pages, filled with language detritus and palimpsestic puns.

Joachim admits that the lines are beautiful, like an old loaf of bread with bright pink mould, but not edible. He compares Joyce's writing process to a hyena constantly returning to a carcass, asphyxiating the English language with foreign words and twisting his own writing until the story was gasping for breath. He also mentions the character Shem in the book, a writer like Joyce who never finishes and uses his own excrement to write. Joachim believes that the book is soiled and blackened, supposedly comic but actually not funny at all. It's the diary of a man who becomes compost, filled with despair and insanity. After sharing all this, Samuel decides to skip the book.

The single greatest accomplishment in all of literature is truly a matter of great debate and personal opinion. Literature has given us countless masterpieces that have touched the hearts and minds of people throughout the ages. From the epic poems of Homer to the novels of Tolstoy, from the plays of Shakespeare to the works of modern-day authors, each piece has its own unique charm and significance.

Some might argue that the greatest accomplishment is the ability of literature to transport us to different times and places, to allow us to experience the lives and emotions of others. Others might point to the power of literature to inspire us, to make us think differently about the world around us, and to encourage us to take action. Still others might believe that the greatest accomplishment is the beauty and artistry of the language itself, the way in which words can be crafted into works of genius.

Ultimately, the single greatest accomplishment in all of literature is something that each of us must decide for ourselves. It is a reflection of our own personal tastes, values, and experiences. But one thing is certain: literature will continue to be a source of inspiration, entertainment, and enlightenment for generations to come.

I don't even know how to rate this because I'm convinced it's not a book, it's a fever dream. FW isn't written in English. It's not even written in any human language. Who let this be published?

You know when you attempt to read a book in a language that you are not overly familiar with and you're simply too indolent to consult a dictionary, thus resorting to guessing the meaning of words from the context?

Finnegans Wake is precisely like that, except that there isn't even a dictionary available, even if you desired one. A great deal will remain beyond your comprehension. You turn the final page and it feels as though you have just emerged from a convoluted dream. And just like a dream, it will leave behind a hazy sensation, yet its intricacies will gradually fade from your memory.

Few individuals read Finnegans Wake, and there are valid reasons for this. It demands an enormous amount of time and patience. You could spend hours poring over a single page, laboriously working your way through obscure allusions, puns, and dense sentences, and still have the sense that you haven't made any progress whatsoever. The rewards for your efforts are rather insubstantial. Joyce will manage to make you laugh and you'll be in awe of his wordplay, but you'll also find him exasperating in the way that the genius of others makes us acutely aware of our own inadequacies and limitations.

In my estimation, FW did not surpass Ulysses. Perhaps it's because I possess a more analytical mindset. I prefer the impeccable chronological order of Ulysses to the chaotic nocturnal world of FW.

FW bombards you with an overwhelming amount of information. It discusses numerous things simultaneously (a single word can be replete with meaning), which can amuse, disorient, and exhaust you all within the span of one paragraph. You might assume that a book of such vast scope would be more universal, but, as strange as it may seem, it actually feels constricting. Encased within its language and abstractions. It's a book without a heart, where the characters blend into one another and their very existence is open to dispute. You admire the spectacle, and the applause is well-deserved, but you simply don't care.

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ADDITIONAL READING

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell

Finnegans Wake: What It' s All About and Re Joyce by Anthony Burgess

A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake and A Reader's Guide to James Joyce by William York Tindall

Joyce's Book of the Dark by John Bishop

Annotations to Finnegans Wake by Roland McHugh

Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress by Samuel Beckett

A sort of triumph, a sort of failure. It's truly an enigma that defies easy rating. In fact, it stands completely apart from anything else in English literature, which in itself is quite an achievement. On one hand, it can be outrageously pretentious, making it easy to want to despise. However, there's no denying that delving into some of its passages can bring enormous enjoyment. A single sentence here can be as rich and detailed as an entire book elsewhere. Rereading it reveals a whole new world of meaning, making each experience completely different. Some parts are uproariously funny, others are tantalizingly sexy, and many are breathtakingly beautiful. And yet, the entire work is completely insane. It drives me crazy, and yet, I think I love it. It's a literary masterpiece that challenges and confounds, but ultimately leaves an indelible mark on the reader's soul.

88th book of 2020.

My previous review of this was jejune, and I’ve wanted to write something more formal ever since. I’ve come to realize that in my long-winded reviews of books I either love or hate, I’m often not telling the whole truth. Review writing is difficult as it is superficial, just a distilled moment of insight into a novel. I’ve written glowing reviews for books that aren’t really that great and attacked those that are actually very good. This troubles me a lot and makes me stand by my point that you could read most of my reviews here and perhaps learn nothing about my true thoughts on the books I’ve read. A glass of whiskey in the pub with me would likely reveal all my true feelings about literature.

I feel I must say first that, yes, I read this entire novel. You might say “read”; the act of reading this novel requires its own verb. But as far as reading goes, I read every word in this book from the first page to the last, usually in long sessions either mumbling under my breath in the library or performing aloud in my attic room, with a glass of rum and coke (my preferred drink) in one hand and the book in the other. Finnegans Wake is known as the most difficult book in the Western canon. It’s hardly written in English. “Joyce invented a unique polyglot-language or idioglossia solely for the purpose of this work. This language is composed of composite words from some sixty to seventy world languages, combined to form puns, or portmanteau words and phrases intended to convey several layers of meaning at once.” You open the book and are immediately faced with incomprehensible language. The first page begins:

\\n  

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen-core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since dev- linsfirst loved livvy.

\\n

This continues for 700 pages without a letup in its difficulty. Any belief that Joyce will allow the clouds to part and meaning to fall on the prose of this novel is naïve. Martin Amis once said, “Finnegans Wake is a 700 page crossword clue, and the answer is ‘the’”—‘the’ being the final word of the novel.

The general question that plagues Finnegans Wake is a simple one-word question: Why? It took Joyce seventeen years to write this novel and Why? Joyce said to William Bird:

”About my new work – do you know, Bird, I confess I can’t understand some of my critics, like Pound or Miss Weaver, for instance. They say it’s obscure. They compare it, of course, with Ulysses. But the action of Ulysses was chiefly in the daytime, and the action of my new work takes place chiefly at night. It’s natural things should not be so clear at night, isn’t it now?”

He replied to criticism from Jacques Mercanton about the difficulty and obscurity of his work by saying “It is night. It is dark. You can hardly see. You sense rather.” This defence of Joyce’s is the closest I’ve ever come to a true answer to that question: Why? There are countless essays on “Meaning” in fiction, on “The Defence of Plotless Novels”, etc., and Joyce stands at the end of that long road littered with corpses.

Finnegans Wake must be read aloud; I learned that. There is nothing for the reader who reads it silently in their head. The rhythm, the puns, the rhyme and the cadence of this tiny universe come to life when one reads it aloud. After all, if nothing else, if we can find no other answer to that Why? then we must accept that it is an experiment, a linguistic explosion, a man who had written Ulysses and wondered where to go next. Amis was right when he said, “At what cost? We may have had two more Ulysses”, had he not written this. In the introduction to my edition Seamus Deane calls the book, “…a miniaturised form of the whole western literary tradition.”

If we ignore the question of Why? then we come to the question of Is it worth reading? The answer is probably No. In fact, I never set out to read it. I do believe that Ulysses is a brilliant novel and would say that with a glass of whiskey in a pub too. The worst bits, the most crude and juvenile bits of that book are handled with great wit and beauty, and for all its flaws it excels. I also think The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a fantastic book and would say that with a glass of whiskey in a pub as well. There is no defending Finnegans Wake—there is no true answer to any of the questions one can pose it and perhaps that was Joyce’s ambition. What did he say about ensuring his immortality by keeping literary critics busy forever. Well, he’s still being read today, though Finnegans Wake is “largely unread by the general public”; and who is surprised?

I have saved some of the quotes I gathered from my reading of this and want to keep them alive again, so here is a small selection of things I have underlined in my copy of the novel:

Perkodhuskurunbarggruayagokgorlayorgromgremmitghundhurthrumathunaradidillifaititillibumulunukkunun!
Ullhodturdenweirmudgaardgringnirurdrmolnirfenrirlukkilokkibaugimandodrrerisurtkrinmgernrackinarockar!
Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!
Nettled before nibbling, can scarce turn a scale but, grossed after meals, weighs a town himself.
the sudden spluttered petulance of some capjtaljsed mIddle
Words weigh no no more to him than raindrops to Rethfernhim. Which we all like. Rain. When we sleep. Drops. But wait until our sleeping. Drain. Sdops.
in presence of whole landslots; forebe all the rassias; sire of leery subs a dub; the Diggis, Woodenhage, as to hang out at; with spawnish oel full his angalach; the sousenugh; gnomeosulphidosalamermauderman
Gnug of old Gnig. Ni, gnid mig brawly! I bag your burden.

And here are singular words pulled from all over the text again strung together:

\\n  

petrifake, allaboardshoops, meathewersoftened, konditiens, ferroconcrete, Sygstryggs, liealoud, gohellt, forkenpootsies, zootzaks, comeundermends, Erievikkingr, ouishguss, miklamanded, whulesalesolde, clansakiltic, Spickinusand, aaherra, godhsbattaring, Oscarvaughther, trixiestrail, womanahoussy, Luxuumburgher, quiverlipe, ninya-nanya, finnoc, hedcosycasket, konyglik, cettehis, vixendevolment…

\\n

For all its worth addressing the novel’s characters and plot, I won’t. I probably stand with Ezra Pound when he gave instructions for reading Finnegans Wake:

\\"Hold the book upside down; drink half a bottle of absinthe before beginning; pay someone else to translate it into readable English while you chug-a-lug that absinthe; skip every second word; invent your own back-story for the characters of Earwicker and Anna Livia, possibly involving futuristic cloning techniques; read something else.\\"

Read something else is his closing sentiment. My closing sentiment is read what inspires you to read. If you have enough time, enough rum, enough intrigue, to carry you through the 700 page crossword clue to find the answer is “the”, then read Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

Did I finish reading The Restored Finnegans Wake? Nope.

I read this one. I read this one. Am I going to finish The Restored Finnegans Wake? Yep.

I pick up the Wake at odd moments that seem to lapse invisibly between other moments. I flip to random pages, and it's truly astonishing how detailed my recollections can be of specific passages within this vortext.

This thing only grows and expands and whirls about its own gyre. It creates itself constantly while I look away. For weeks at a time, it sits there on my bookshelf, generating itself silently, like some kind of bound chrysalis that never breaks open and frees itself. It waits for me to peel back the cottony veil of its covers.

It sings in my dreams, there's no doubt about that. Often, I feel as if I am living my days within its covers, among its script-labyrinths. The instant I started reading Finnegans Wake was the instant I left the World. Since then, I've been like Echo, its winding streams entrapping me on isles of many-tongued birds and spectral flora. I follow stags deep into rainlighted forests, calling \\"Who's there? Who's there?...\\" waiting for the sky or something behind it to call back to me, in umbral glens while slowly turning to stone.

I believe this is the fate of all those who have fallen in love with a God.