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This week’s Finnegans Wake adventures have been nothing short of fun and a wee bit clarifying as well as, of course, confounding.  Chapter one of the first book has been read and reread, so there’s that.  My goal of 52 pages a month is almost met, so that’s even more.  And more still: the second chapter is noted by many critics and scholars as considerably more approachable, so I feel as though the hard part is over. (Hilarious—the hard part has not yet begun.)

I don’t claim to understand much of this but I laughed at least once a page.  There's plenty to laugh at among the puns and neogolisms and layers upon maddening layers.  And I managed to follow a good bit of it thanks to Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, John Bishop, and Ronald McHugh.  Much has been made of Joyce’s use of Vico’s La Scienza Nuova as the structure of the book, and McHugh especially does a nice job of elucidating the influence, but one other point of his struck me as fascinating (though I admit it is perhaps the least fascinating aspect of all this): FW can be cut in four.  The first and third books compliment each other, as do the second and fourth.  That balance seems to adhere with other Joycean tricks, so I’m willing to believe McHugh, but let’s say that Joyce was intent on using Vico’s idea of the four stages of civilization as his model.  That would mean that the first and third sections, being corollaries, are representative of the theocratic and democratic stages, while the second and fourth stand in for the aristocratic stage and chaos, with the end wrapping back to the start and the old thunderclap coming to bring man back to the wonder of god/theocratic stage.  I’m certain there’s something to these balanced books and something more to be found in viewing the stages and their corollaries.  I don’t know what, but it’s more food for thought in this grand feast.

More coming, god willing.