Wakey Wakey! A Joycean noisy'un notion.

[Pavlov`s Dog`s Dad`s Dead]

On something of a whim or a whirr I've used, or possibly squandered, or perhaps invested, one of my 3-for-99p Audible credits on the audiobook of Finnegan's Wake, read by Barry McGovern and, so I'm promised, Marcella Riordan. I'll have a lot of driving to do in July, so wanted something to sink my auditory teeth into, something highbrow for the highway.

Also, basically all I know about Finnegan's Wake is that the sound of the language is key to the work, so I wanted someone to lead me by the ear and interpret the spoken form of the writing for me. McGovern's mellifluous tones are certainly easy on this pig's ear, and inspire confidence that there is a silk purse of meaning somewhere in there to be grasped.

As things stand, after a return trip from Leeds to Newcastle, I'm about halfway through chapter three. I'm enjoying the experience so far, although it's a much less linear experience than any other book I have experienced. Instead, the words wash over me like a wave on the incoming tide; it breaks, and the waters recede around me, leaving fragments of half-recognised wordplay and allusion, but no trace of anything so mundane as an actual narrative. A stream of half-consciousness, only half the contents of which I can perhaps make any sense out of - what little research I have done thus far tells me that in fact this dream-like state is possibly not entirely coincidental.

In all honesty, the only remotely relevant reference point I have right now is Viv Stanshall's Rawlinson End spoken-word sequence, which is the only other thing I know that plays with the sound of the language(s) with such a sense of fun, while also being layered and dense with allusion and subtext. With all due respect to Viv, however, this seems to fly on a different plane entirely, jointly and severally.

I'm glad I have taken the plunge, and I am excited at the prospect of continuing my best efforts to tread water as the deluge continues. Those of you that have made it to the other side, what do you wish you had known as or before you embarked on the traversal? Is anyone prepared to admit they gave up before the end, and if so, what were your reasons? Lastly, I'm not sure whether there can actually be spoilers, as such, concerning a work like this, but if such there are, I'd appreciate avoiding them.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

I'm glad I have taken the plunge, and I am excited at the prospect of continuing my best efforts to tread water as the deluge continues. Those of you that have made it to the other side, what do you wish you had known as or before you embarked on the traversal?

http://www.ricorso.net/rx/library/criticism/classic/Beckett_S/Exagmination.htm

[buttgammon]

There are so many different ways to approach this book that it's always going to be a case of trial and error. In my opinion, it's not a big deal to understand everything (or more precisely anything) first time round; there are really good annotations available but they would slow down a reading so much that it would become pointless. If there's something particularly interesting then go ahead and dive deeper but I think getting a feel for the sound of the language is the best way, so an audiobook would work very well.

If you want to read around the Wake a bit first, there's an excellent book called Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake by Finn Fordham, which looks at a few sections in detail to give an idea of the richness behind the text, but it also provides some fascinating context about Joyce's working methods - which explain a lot about the content of the book - and some overviews that will be helpful in understanding how things like plot and character start to emerge (and they are there, even though it takes a long time to identify them).

If you ever do fancy going for a deeper dive, there are some really good sources for annotations which can help decode a lot of the allusions, puns and references. There's a very useful website called Fweet but there's also a published book by Roland McHugh which goes through it page-by-page.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

If you want to read around the Wake a bit first, there's an excellent book called Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake by Finn Fordham, which looks at a few sections in detail to give an idea of the richness behind the text, but it also provides some fascinating context about Joyce's working methods - which explain a lot about the content of the book - and some overviews that will be helpful in understanding how things like plot and character start to emerge (and they are there, even though it takes a long time to identify them).

i enjoyed this one very much, its one of my favourites. the exposition on buckley is one of the most enjoyable and thorough pieces of scholarship on joyce ive read, really hacks into the depths without losing sight of the fun. its a great argument for why its worth the time and effort.  i also enjoyed the treatment of issy - pleasingly sensitive and avoided the forensics that sometimes feminine persona are subject to by archive minded critics.

i have a lot of disagreements with the conclusion - which repeat a couple of truisms about the book that are bugbears of mine but overall its an excellent entry point to both reading the wake and reading about the wake

If you ever do fancy going for a deeper dive, there are some really good sources for annotations which can help decode a lot of the allusions, puns and references. There's a very useful website called Fweet but there's also a published book by Roland McHugh which goes through it page-by-page.

both sigla and annotations are invaluable, because they teach the reader to follow the suggestions of the figures appearances rather than imagine that there are definite intended appearances - mchugh helps cultivate the mind to read these suggestions and signpostings and overcome the instinct to look for persistant characters. it is a shame that there isnt readily available version of sigla available, or that no one else has produced a work like it that preserves mchughs trademark impartiality

[Video Game Fan 2000]

another thing maybe to recommend is locating the key monologue sections of book, which are unmarked when they appear and read them seperately because they contain one figure or personas account of the incidents of the book from a certain point in life

some of these - like haveth childers everwhere - were written and published seperately before the book was assembled so they work as vertical slices

joyce breaks a lot of basic rules about voice and narrative in these, and establishes his new methodology which is as distinct from interior monologue as that is to third person narration. so its useful to compare and contrast how he establishes eldery female v middle aged male voices, historic v present incidents, and so on.

as Beckett helpfully points out - transcendental features of human life are treated as non-absolute in Finnegans Wake, emergent properties rather than foundations. the past has to emerge as the past, its not a straightaway given of the passage of time - why is time linear? how did time become linear? - and Joyce sees this kind of thing not as abstract philosophical inquiry but the basic emergence of ordinary life.... i like to see it as the collectivisation or universalisation of what he originally wrote for Stephen. Stephen is human artifice in an individual, a self-styling man who creates his world and himself in the same gestures (and encounters the social and political limits of that in doing so) - Finnegans Wake considers 'here comes everyone' - what if that is true for us all? what if we're all artists, creating our lives just by living them? (and again, encountering the limits of that)

the monologues (they're not really) are a good example of that since they not only describe a certain persons experience of something like civic history or sexual difference, they chart how things like history and sexual difference are the result of compounded lives, compounded acts of minor creativity. the voices arent of individuals, who are there but in particulate form, but of the sedimentation constituted by those individual lives.

[Pavlov`s Dog`s Dad`s Dead]

http://www.ricorso.net/rx/library/criticism/classic/Beckett_S/Exagmination.htm

Thank you! I have enjoyed reading that, although I will need to read it again. And again. Which ties in neatly with the initial impression I have formed that one of Beckett's points is that - and I paraphrase this idea in the way that I grasp it, which is to say clumsily - Joyce is describing a great unceasing progression/procession which nonetheless ultimately moves nowhere, or at any rate, only circulates.

I also very much enjoy the line "His writing is not about something; it is that something itself." This seems to echo my own, well, understanding would be too strong a word. Inclination? Or even "inkling", if we were to invert Beckett's insistence such that [the work] is not only to be listened too, but also looked at. (Incidentally, who is the "eminent English novelist and historian"?)

Anyway, I fear there is little to be gained by my inexpert parroting of that which Beckett has already expressed much more skilfully. I will do better to go back and read it again, hopefully slightly less inexpertly. But I do feel as though my eyes are somewhat wider open, now.

[Pavlov`s Dog`s Dad`s Dead]

There are so many different ways to approach this book that it's always going to be a case of trial and error. In my opinion, it's not a big deal to understand everything (or more precisely anything) first time round; there are really good annotations available but they would slow down a reading so much that it would become pointless. If there's something particularly interesting then go ahead and dive deeper but I think getting a feel for the sound of the language is the best way, so an audiobook would work very well.

Ok, thank you; it's good to hear there may be some value in my approach, both in terms of auditory input and of (in)comprehension.

If you want to read around the Wake a bit first, there's an excellent book called Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake by Finn Fordham, which looks at a few sections in detail to give an idea of the richness behind the text, but it also provides some fascinating context about Joyce's working methods - which explain a lot about the content of the book - and some overviews that will be helpful in understanding how things like plot and character start to emerge (and they are there, even though it takes a long time to identify them).

overall its an excellent entry point to both reading the wake and reading about the wake

It very much sounds like this will be time well spent, sooner rather than later.

If you ever do fancy going for a deeper dive, there are some really good sources for annotations which can help decode a lot of the allusions, puns and references. There's a very useful website called Fweet but there's also a published book by Roland McHugh which goes through it page-by-page.

I suspect I'll save that for the second go-around, but it's good to know they are there if I need it. I'm guessing Fweet is the printed representation of the word I have been hearing as Fuit, which I'm parsing as the Latin for "it was", and as an insistence that the events described really took place. Way off-beam?

[bgmnts]

Would love to tackle this novel but think I'd need to read more conventional stuff first. Closest thing I've read to a stream of consciousness, plotless, experimental impenetrable thing is Alan Moore's Jerusalem, and I've only managed half of that on audiobook, so it may be too much.

Would like to hear if it's any good though!

[Video Game Fan 2000]

dbl post

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Thank you! I have enjoyed reading that, although I will need to read it again. And again. Which ties in neatly with the initial impression I have formed that one of Beckett's points is that - and I paraphrase this idea in the way that I grasp it, which is to say clumsily - Joyce is describing a great unceasing progression/procession which nonetheless ultimately moves nowhere, or at any rate, only circulates.

the image is derived from Croce's version of Vico - which in turn was read by those in Joyces circle as kind of Vico amped up with Heraclitus and Nietzsche's eternal return.

if have the idea of cyclical history on one hand - that everything goes, everything come backs and things return to constant themes without beginning or end. and on the other, true flux or chaos where the world is a play of meaningless forces that circulate but never arrive at anywhere they've seen before.

Finnegans Wake inhabits a dialogue of these two positions. the world is a chaotic flux of objects and events, but it has polar or nodal points that re-emerge over time. the word people use for this is "chaosmos" - the contradictory world of random forces, that nonetheless spits out artifacts that seem to come from an ordered universe. its not that order isn't real, its that its fleeting and contingent. full of the "legal fictions" seen in ulysses, but impossibly generalised. one important way to interpret Beckett's famous comment that "is not about something" is the demonstration that language is part and parcel of this dialogue between order and chaos, and probably the most important part since its where the two extremes meet the most in human life. (Donald Davidson's essay "James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty" is recommended to - it describes how Joyce demonstrates meaning to be secondary to intention and usage, meaning accrues over time in use, language isn't lead by the nose by greater meanings, meaning is the result of compound and collective acts of linguistic creativity)

I'm guessing Fweet is the printed representation of the word I have been hearing as Fuit, which I'm parsing as the Latin for "it was", and as an insistence that the events described really took place. Way off-beam?

absolutely bang on because derrida's famous talk on joyce is largely an exposition on this - where he extracts the words "he war" to describe the central conflict of the book

i interpret the "fuits" in finnegans wake as the guilty party nervously biting or puffing his pipe as he assures that events really took place as described. we're told that he smokes and also that he stammers when he's guilty or nervous. so the frequent variations on pfuit pfuit are "puff puff" and "fuit fuit" combined. (i saw a cartoon somewhere illustrating this idea but i cant find it now)

[Pink Gregory]

Would love to tackle this novel but think I'd need to read more conventional stuff first. Closest thing I've read to a stream of consciousness, plotless, experimental impenetrable thing is Alan Moore's Jerusalem, and I've only managed half of that on audiobook, so it may be too much.

Would like to hear if it's any good though!

If the audiobook is divided into three books like I read it, there's a chapter in the third book that is explicitly a Finnegan's Wake pastiche, it concerns Lucia Joyce being a patient at Stm Andrew's Hospital in Northampton.

It took me about two weeks to read it.

[Smeraldina Rima]

You might like reading in these digitised issues of transition magazine on Gallica in which "Work in Progress" was originally published serially alongside other remembered and forgotten writing of the time.

(Incidentally, who is the "eminent English novelist and historian"?)

That's usually been interpreted as Wyndham Lewis with reference to this criticism in "An Analysis of the mind of James Joyce":

.

I'd also be interested to read your thoughts as you go along. Are you coming to this having read through Joyce's writing and up to it - thinking of Ulysses in particular - or not?

Regarding your question about things you would have liked to have known before reading it: more languages and more literature. I did enjoy reading from it perplexed, more in short passages slowly than as a whole quickly, but I hope that I will rejoyce (are you having that, James?) when rereading Finnegans Wake one day.

Would love to tackle this novel but think I'd need to read more conventional stuff first.

I think you'd enjoy reading Ulysses especially with your interest in antiquity. It would be interesting to follow an X-Men type reading of the book's eighteen episodes, one a week or something, with or without The Odyssey.

i have a lot of disagreements with the conclusion - which repeat a couple of truisms about the book that are bugbears of mine

What are the disagreements, truisms and bugbears?

[buttgammon]

That's usually been interpreted as Wyndham Lewis with reference to this criticism in "An Analysis of the mind of James Joyce":

.

This is a really interesting strand of the Wake itself, as Joyce began seeding his rebuttal of Lewis within his work around this time, and there are a few rather unflattering references to Lewis, but it's also interesting that he thought this particular criticism was worthy of attention and debate. The Lewis business highlights one of my favourite elements of the Wake, which is that because the writing process was so long and it was so hotly anticipated for so many years, that Joyce managed to pre-emptively engage with criticism before the book itself had even been published in full!

[Video Game Fan 2000]

What are the disagreements, truisms and bugbears?

the disintegration or explosion image that Fordham settles on. while you can't fault his analogy - Mr Creosote, the association of Finnegans Wake with the flux of becomings that arrive after the end of universals is a tame reading to me. the way Fordham shows the text to be immanent to its own method of construction, through the clustering and layering methods familiar to genetic and archival critic, i think is exciting and very significant. but in the end he reduces that the image of universal archetype and social defaults crumbling into a mix of granular particularity and flux.

what i like the most about that book is that it definitively moves that question of the end of universals from an idealogical sphere to a matter of writing and composition, a matter of process, which is a fantastic way to us Beckett's "not about, but is" maxim to mediate between immanent critique and genetic scholarship. i think the conclusion short sells its own describing of this "unravelling" with ideas that could have come from any piece of academic writing from the past two decades - privileging becoming over being and difference over identity, finally arriving at multiplicity as unifying concept.

what i really wanted at the end was for Fordham to confront the strangeness and idiosyncratic nature of Joyce's treatment of the question of universality - what Beckett describes as individuation, the laying up of universality in the emergence of the individual as a site of sensation and experience. and it seemed like he was going to right until the very end when the conclusion rehearsed a very typical and normal view of the book - that archetypal figures couldn't hold on to their universality in modernity, identity feeding on difference until it bursts. so in the conclusion the thesis of unravelling of the universal being not a philosophical idea about the world but immanent to the process of composing text ultimately seemed lost in a more usual set of oppositions, which was disappointing considering the treatment of the same ideas in the account of joyce's process (the section on atom splitting iirc, but i dont have it to hand) - - the theme of collectivity and the aggregation of ordinary humanity (as rousing from sleep?) in the murphies was so suggestive, so original and timely, it felt like a damp squib to go somewhere so usual after that.

but my own ideas about FW are admittedly contentious and i have major bones to pick even with McHugh and Ellman so its inevitable the more excited i am by books on the topic, the more aggrieved and critical ill be of their conclusions.

This is a really interesting strand of the Wake itself, as Joyce began seeding his rebuttal of Lewis within his work around this time, and there are a few rather unflattering references to Lewis, but it's also interesting that he thought this particular criticism was worthy of attention and debate. The Lewis business highlights one of my favourite elements of the Wake, which is that because the writing process was so long and it was so hotly anticipated for so many years, that Joyce managed to pre-emptively engage with criticism before the book itself had even been published in full!

"blasted bleating blatant bloaten blasphorus blesphorous idiot who kennet tell a bomb from a pineapple"

[Smeraldina Rima]

Thanks for that. I'll have to read the Fordham book when I come back to the Wake. Hopefully the Sigla will be made available somewhere too. I think you mentioned half-seriously once that you have one or two books that you really care about. I'm guessing they're Finnegans Wake and something by Hegel.

@buttgammon don't worry if it's all a bit hazy now but do you have a favourite example of Joyce including pre-emptive criticism? And did you find anything interesting or newish about Defoe in the Wake, or was that interest not Wake-specific...

[buttgammon]

Off the top of my head, the whole Professor Jones section is particularly memorable, because it combines a genuine intellectual engagement with the substance of Time and Western Man with lots of insults (which a lot of people would argue is a better way of dealing with Wyndham Lewis).

I never got to look at Defoe's influence as much as I wanted; it's one of those projects I'd love to get stuck into but never seem to have the time. The main thing that has interested me is how Joyce was clearly interested in the idea of homo economicus in his early writing on Defoe and this is something that I suspect was a significant influence on how Leopold Bloom's character was formed.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

i think its vital to understand that joyce was serious with the time stuff - it appears seperately to the lewis burlesques and even those really do have serious engagement, although i wouldnt say with T&WM itself more like it shoots through that book like a retical. my feeling is that joyce was genuinely amused by it more than he was angered by it, he didnt recognise the image of himself in it at all. further i think he (rightly) foresaw that Lewis association of him with Bergson and like personalities would be a persistant reading, and that enable him to use T&WM to propel himself somewhere he wouldnt have been able to get to without such a foil, building on a lot of fascinations he'd expressed elsewhere- i see it as a combination of his exploitation of intellectual argument and his reliance on savaging personal hate-figures like Gogarty. Lewis really walked into it, it dings him for his misogyny as much as T&WM

The main thing that has interested me is how Joyce was clearly interested in the idea of homo economicus in his early writing on Defoe and this is something that I suspect was a significant influence on how Leopold Bloom's character was formed.

i think a lot of this orbits the sketch for the Dubliners or post-Dubliners prototype for Ulysses - the notion of economically embedded man with mobility and travel

it is interesting to me how After The Race contains seeds for all of these ideas which mature in the Wake - the association of economic development with a race around a circuit, but also with the solar cycle, and the distinction between the mobile and the stationary as competing subjectivities that are present in the Stone/Tree and Humphrey/Sackerson and Anna/Kate contrasts in the Wake. its yet another area where i think Joyce got out ahead of postmodern and postcolonial critiques and already furnished himself with a subverted version of the frames his work would one day be viewed through, even if a lot of it is his uncanny knack for serendipitous imagery.

i think a lot about blooms alleged transition from a salesman to a canvasser (depending on how definitive the plan for the story really was), and how the ? path he walks bridges that - the Moebius strip route of After the Race and Two Gallants, which the unwritten Ulysses story may have developed further, broken by a complete rethink of the human subject. its very hard not to see HCE's status as a Prot or northerner in Dublin as a maturation of sorts, its own thematic circuit completion as HCE comes complete with the "wall street" association and the suggestion of insurance scams and dishonest dealers in the third book

(edit: writing tihs i realise ive completely forgotten whether joyces remarks on the hunter story and the putative proto-ulysses were the same idea or not. it wouldnt have been 'ulysses' if he was going in a circle and not going home would it duh)

[Video Game Fan 2000]

another good thing about the professors breakfast is that you're free to read in it both a precursor to the "please stop" telegram joke in Blackadder and Father Christmas Don't Touch Me

[Pavlov`s Dog`s Dad`s Dead]

You might like reading in these digitised issues of transition magazine on Gallica in which "Work in Progress" was originally published serially alongside other remembered and forgotten writing of the time.

That's usually been interpreted as Wyndham Lewis with reference to this criticism in "An Analysis of the mind of James Joyce":

.

I'd also be interested to read your thoughts as you go along. Are you coming to this having read through Joyce's writing and up to it - thinking of Ulysses in particular - or not?

Regarding your question about things you would have liked to have known before reading it: more languages and more literature. I did enjoy reading from it perplexed, more in short passages slowly than as a whole quickly, but I hope that I will rejoyce (are you having that, James?) when rereading Finnegans Wake one day.

I'm really grateful for this response, and hope to return to it in more detail once time allows. Hopefully, soon!

[bgmnts]

I think you'd enjoy reading Ulysses especially with your interest in antiquity. It would be interesting to follow an X-Men type reading of the book's eighteen episodes, one a week or something, with or without The Odyssey.

Cheers! May actually try this as I do have a copy of The Iliad and Odyssey here so would make sense.

[buttgammon]

It's this book's 84th birthday today!

[Pavlov`s Dog`s Dad`s Dead]

That's usually been interpreted as Wyndham Lewis

I see, thanks. I already feel intellectually under-equipped for this endeavour given that it took me a good while to remember this wasn't the Triffids guy...

I'd also be interested to read your thoughts as you go along.

Oh, I hadn't thought of doing that - it never occurred to me that anyone might be interested. On top of which, judging by the learned responses I've had in this thread, I doubt I'd have much to offer. I've really enjoyed the way that it's becoming almost an online seminar, though.

On a practical note, I'll be doing most of my listening while I'm driving, so note taking will be a challenge, especially given my ADHD memory: all I really recall from my most recent session is a reference to "Ereland", which I took to invoke Erewhon and thus ideas of Ireland as utopia. The trouble is, I think, I'm focusing on examples of wordplay like that at a very micro level, and probably therefore not seeing the wood for the trees.

Are you coming to this having read through Joyce's writing and up to it - thinking of Ulysses in particular - or not?

No, I'm coming fresh. I read Dubliners a couple of decades ago, but retain very little of it. I may have read Portrait of the Artist, too...

Regarding your question about things you would have liked to have known before reading it: more languages and more literature. I did enjoy reading from it perplexed, more in short passages slowly than as a whole quickly, but I hope that I will rejoyce (are you having that, James?) when rereading Finnegans Wake one day.

OK, well, there's some hope for me yet, then. I've a good grounding in English etymology, French, and Russian, and some sense of Germanic and Romantic languages. I've enough Latin for the judgin', but very little Greek. I'm fairly well-read, although ironically nineteenth century and Edwardian literature - as opposed to genre fiction- in English is a something of a blind spot.

I think what I probably should do is pause for now and read Fordham, then resume listening once my commutes get longer. At the moment, I'm doing 20-25 minutes, which isn't a lot for my ear to attune.

[Smeraldina Rima]

It's this book's 84th birthday today!

Thanks for marking this. It was enough to make me read the passage you'd mentioned. I didn't understand much of it as a parody of Lewis or a pre-emptive defence against criticism with my stranded intelligence but still. The lines at the beginning reminded me of having liked the alliterative verse like parts. I like Joyce's writing about Defoe. His descriptions took me to some less well-known writings (Duncan Campbell and Dickory Cronke) that I was disenchanted to find have since been de-attributed or doubted :(

I hadn't thought of doing that

Only if you feel like sharing how it's going or now how helpful you find Fordham's book. I think it's interesting a) to be listening while driving b) being pretty well equipped for polysemy with your language skills (I can't even drive) c) not having first read Ulysses. I think I'd want to read a few pages of the longer parts you listen to and compare reading and listening. From your description you've reached the marginal glosses and footnotes in the second book. How does the audiobook handle these?

[buttgammon]

Thanks for marking this. It was enough to make me read the passage you'd mentioned. I didn't understand much of it as a parody of Lewis or a pre-emptive defence against criticism with my stranded intelligence but still. The lines at the beginning reminded me of having liked the alliterative verse like parts. I like Joyce's writing about Defoe. His descriptions took me to some less well-known writings (Duncan Campbell and Dickory Cronke) that I was disenchanted to find have since been de-attributed or doubted :(

A lot of it is specific engagement with Time and Western Man; for example, the publication date is encoded in the year of the Jewish calendar that gets mentioned (I have a very heavily annotated copy of the book from a couple of reading groups and this is a bit I've got into too much detail with - Lewis's book was published around Rosh Hashanah, so I can't be 100% certain whether Joyce got the date right).

[Smeraldina Rima]

Are there any good online reading groups?

[buttgammon]

I'm not sure at the moment - there were quite a few but they generally came out of in-person ones going online over covid and people started inviting more distant friends and colleagues.