11

Two chapters finished-- more thoughts to come, but I figured I might benefit from a break form the Wake, so, to honor JJ on his birthday, I read the opening pages of "The Dead", which is often regarded as not only his best story but the finest ever written (in English).  But I couldn't get through it.  It's great stuff, but the prose was too straight forward.  The Wake is poisoning me against standard prose.  

10

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. 

9

As I dive deeper into some scholarship on The Wake, I'll try to keep these words by Patrick Kavanagh in mind:

“Who Killed James Joyce?”

Who killed James Joyce?
I, said the commentator,
I killed James Joyce
For my graduation.

What weapon was used
To slay mighty Ulysses?
The weapon that was used
Was a Harvard thesis.

How did you bury Joyce?
In a broadcast Symposium.
That’s how we buried Joyce
To a tuneful encomium.

Who carried the coffin out?
Six Dublin codgers
Led into Langham Place
By W. R. Rodgers.

Who said the burial prayers? –
Please do not hurt me –
Joyce was no Protestant,
Surely not Bertie?

Who killed Finnegan?
I, said a Yale-man, 
I was the man who made
The corpse for the wake man.

And did you get high marks,
The Ph.D.?
I got the B.Litt.
And my master’s degree.

Did you get money
For your Joycean knowledge?
I got a scholarship 

To Trinity College.
I made the pilgrimage
In the Bloomsday swelter
From the Martello Tower
To the cabby’s shelter.

8

Last night I read chapter one of Finnegans Wake.  Very soon I noticed the name Haroun mentioned, which struck me as odd because earlier that day I had a conversation with my wife about the Salman Rushdie book Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which I rather liked.  We decided to decide to keep that book (this was during a four hour pruning of our library) though it nearly got added to the sell pile.  After I told her that Haroun popped up in The Wake, remarking on the coincidence, she reminded me that while I spent last summer reading Ulysses, she was reading The Satanic Verses.  And here was another Joyce-Rushdie connection. 

 

Whoa. It was almost as if Joyce was drawing a connecting line between himself, this future writer named Salman Rushdie, and the future readers of these writers: us: me, my wife, our summer of reading, our days at the beach with these thick books in hand, the pleasure of letting the hours pass while we read and soaked up some sun and tried not to get hit by footballs flying over our heads. 

Well, of course this is not exactly possible.  Still, this coincidence does confirm what I’d already assumed: the reader of The Wake will find in it what they bring. Since Joyce spent so many years packing the book with everything he could think of (and why wouldn’t he think of Haroun, a prophet of Islam) written in every language within reach (and he reached far and wide) then of course the book will reflect something of your experience back at you.  This is the best means of encouragement for the early reader of The Wake (that’s me!).  Abandon the need to get every reference and joke and delight in the surprising amount of things you find that speak to you.  See yourself in the text.  Engage with the book rather than insist that it engage you.  Marvel at the connections the book makes to all of time, past and future. 

 

So there, on page 4, I had my mind blown.  Can't wait to see what the other 624 pages bring. 

More soon.

7

So this barista at Starbucks asks me what I’m reading, possibly out of interest or in order to work me for a tip.  I show him the book, Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas. 

“What’s it about?” he asks. 

After a bit of pondering, I simply say: “Everything.”

Now, the book is not about everything, though it is a wonderful, plotless book full of literary references and digressions along the lines of the other Vila-Matas books I’ve read and enjoyed.  (If I were to write a novel, it would be in this vein, loitering and loose and fun, a true response to other literature.)  But I couldn’t possibly describe the entirety of the book to a barista in Starbucks what with all the people waiting to order.  So I left it at that, dropped some coins in the tip cup, and took myself, Vila-Matas, and my tea the hell out of there. 

This is my long way of stating that I don’t care if I can’t explain a book to someone.  I had a teacher in high school who said that no book should take you more than two weeks to get through and that if you couldn’t summarize the plot when you were finished, you weren’t paying attention.  Now that I am older I know that this— along with so much of what one is told in high school— is bullshit.  (Now that I think of it, my junior year English teacher was overly fond of mystery novels.)  While I see the importance of plot, and while I love a compelling narrative, I also know that there are different types of books just as there are different types of people.  This is a good thing. 

The type of books that Vila-Matas writes are not exactly what Joyce was up to, but I made a connection between the two writers this morning after the encounter at Starbucks.  Stands to reason: I have been thinking about how to tackle Finnegans Wake in the year 2015 and killing time with smaller books, like Never Any End to Paris.  Having put out the call for fellow travelers on Facebook, which I assumed would be ignored, and which, amazingly, netted me one other sucker crazy enough to give this a go, Mr. Chad Post, I concocted a plan of attack.  52 pages a month (or 13 pages a week however you slice it).  This will allow for a slow yet steady read of The Wake in one calendar year.  So, after some emails and a few thoughts and a little pre-reading reading of critical texts and intros, I decided that the best way to read The Wake is to just read the damn thing.  Sure, some overview of the “plot” and characters and themes will help ground me as I wade through the puns and neologisms, but I’m not so much looking for a way into the book as MY way into the book.  And fuck it if I can’t describe the thing to anyone else.

I’m a big fan of the reader response critics and the phenomenologists, so the idea of an individual reading of any one book appeals to me greatly.  If we are all in different, sometimes overlapping interpretive communities, we can see how a work of art that challenges, and Finnegans Wake certainly does, is less a dirty modernist trick and more an invitation for self-discovery, as new agey as that sounds.  I have no idea if I will actually discover anything by reading The Wake, but it may happen.  As I try to explain to my ENG 101 students, reading is about self-discovery in the sense that you get to react to things you read.  These reactions tell you something about yourself.  The important thing is not to love or hate a piece of writing but to address why you love or hate it.  What does your reaction mean?  How can you articulate that and what might be uncovered during the articulation?  

Self-discovery was not my intention when starting this blog but, now that I’m reconciled to a lifelong misunderstanding of The Wake, I shall try to use this space as a means of exploring whatever comes up during this reading. 

And I really don't give a damn if I don’t understand anything so long as I never stop trying to understand everything.  

6

Postcard found in my (used) copy of Ulysses. 

5: The Balance

I finished Ulysses.  To those not aware of the magnitude of that undertaking, this is my literary equivalent of finishing a triathlon.  I state this knowing that the two are quite different, but still… the fucking thing took a lot of training, effort, dedication, patience, resolve, tears, frustration, fear, and did I say effort?  I know, I know… this is a more straightforward book than The Wake, which is the book I said I wanted to read (and the reason this blog was created).  But I also said that I wanted to warm up with the saga of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus and their odyssey around Dublin on that famous June day.  I was anxious to get through it all and to Molly’s famous chapter at the end, which I did the other day while sitting on a Rogers Park beach, which is where I read a good chunk of Joyce’s masterpiece.  Hurray for beach reads.

And it is a masterpiece, a convoluted clusterfucked masterpiece.  There can be no doubt about that.  Well… maybe there can be some doubt. 

I spoke with a friend about the task that is Ulysses and, while doing so, realized that a laborious chore might not make for fun reading.  So why the hell was I doing this to myself?  My friend assured me the endeavor was worth undertaking, that he enjoyed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners considerably more, but that the satisfaction of finishing Ulysses was well worth the time and mental energy.  (He had not, of course, been so crazy as to ever try to read The Wake.)  And it is a satisfying experience and I am happier to have read the book in its completion (not a line skipped), even though I fully admit to not getting everything happening in the tome, for the effect of Ulysses is part of its, er, charm.  I had guides and annotations to help me along the way, but in the end I opted to get though the book largely on my own and try my damnedest to see what Joyce was up to in each episode.  I did consult a few websites to follow the format and see how it all mirrored The Odyssey, which I haven’t read in well over two decades, but my ultimate enjoyment was in figuring out the tricks and intentions to the best of my ability. 

So obviously I ought to tackle The Wake next, right?  Nope.  I need a bit of a break.  And yes, it took me so long to read Ulysses because I was cheating on it constantly with other books, mostly poetry.  And I started reading Boss by Mike Royko last night and am looking forward to a conventionally narrated book of some 200 pages.  I need that variety.  We all do.  With all the data, media, and gadgets vying for our attention, it may be a good idea to mix up the literary diet, get some lean protein with the carbs, maybe a little fiber.  Okay, let’s move on before this analogy gets any more strained.

***

Some thoughts I had while reading Ulysses:

·      How the fuck does Joyce get away with this shit? 

·      Did the guy even have an editor?

·      Nora must’ve been a little pissed over the Penelope episode.

·      Thank god this was done in 1922 and that no one need try something like it again.

·      I am in awe of this episode that recreates the history of English, even if it is a frustrating bunch of pages.

·      The opening (Telemachiad) and the closing (Nostos) sections are amazing pleasures to read.  The middle (the Odyssey) is an amazing feat that comprises most of the book and is impressive but more than once made me want to dig up Joyce and smack his corpse, what’s left of it.

·      It must’ve been fun to have a polyglot over for parties.

·      This is a book to be admired and enjoyed, though I am not sure if I enjoyed it as much as I admire it or if that really matters.

·      This is surely the antidote to Twitter.

·      Anything is possible in literature.  Joyce proved as much.  But just because something is possible does that mean it is worth doing?

·      There’s no way this book should be placed above The Sound and the Fury on anyone’s list of greatest English language novels.

·      Why aren't we reading this is school?  Or did I go to bad schools?

And so on. 

***

So I wrote earlier that reading Ulysses was the equivalent of completing a triathlon, but that is a false analogy.  They are very different experiences, I safely assume.  But I used such a lazy comparison because, 1. It is effective, 2. It makes the point to those who have no real idea what the hell Ulysses is or why reading it is a big deal (to me).  But that’s the society we live in, one that automatically recognizes, quite correctly, the amazing physical effort that goes into training for and completing a big, crazy athletic event but…

I was going to write about the modern world and its lack of appreciation for big, difficult novels, but what the fuck—was everyone reading Ulysses in 1922?  1932?  1948?  1966?  1971?  Nope.  Even with computers and iPhones aplenty, nothing has really changed.  So maybe I ought to back off. 

***

I finished Boss last night.  Essential reading.  I might argue that Ulysses is as well, but I would be less prone to recommend it over Royko’s unauthorized bio of Richard J. Daley.  So why mention them in the same blog post?  Because, again, the balanced diet is important and because they represent two very different books that I think everyone should familiarize themselves with.  Just as I think people should read Bulgakov, Calvino, Ciaran Carson, Neil Postman, Reinaldo Arenas, G. Cabrera Infante, W. B. Yeats… I think everyone ought to read a lot and a lot of different things.  It’s all essential. 

I have a friend who read fifteen romance novels in a week.  Her husband said that she reads too much.  I admit, my first reaction was, “Romance novels?”  But hell—at least the woman is actively literate.  How many people have I met who employ the loathsome term “post-literate” to describe their lack of interest in books, as if using such a term exonerates them.  It doesn't.  You need to read, all the time, everyday, as much as you can, even if what you read is what some might consider fluff.  Then again, as I argued via Facebook of all goddamn places, reading anything is good but one ought to try a challenge once in a while. 

Why?  Why is this important?  I should have a better answer.  My canned response would be something along the lines of the brain is a muscle and one must exercise or lose muscles, again using a fucking athletic analogy to make this simple goddamn point.  But is this the case?  I’ve seen studies that imply that the reading most done in 21^st century America— Facebook, Twitter, scrolling marquees at the bottom of Fox News broadcasts—is still reading, still communication via the inorganic means of symbols representing words, words representing ideas and events.  Just as I no longer lament that the internet is making us lazy and stupid (a lazy and stupid conclusion), I can also accept that literacy is literacy is literacy however it is practiced.

But fuck that.

This is the same as saying that eating is important to live, so it makes little difference what one eats so long as they are eating.  Which is stupid.  Obviously eating nothing but McDonald’s may have serious health consequences (We don't need Morgan Spurlock to tell us that).  Obviously one ought to balance their diet a bit and eat some green leafy vegetables as well as pizza. (Last night I did this—stopped at the corner store and purchased some tomatoes and spinach to make a nice, simple salad to go along with the frozen pizza I planned to devour because I fucking love pizza and was very hungry and had spent the entire train ride home thinking about pizza in ways that are perhaps not natural or sane.  But I assuaged the wee bit of guilt over eating an entire goddamn pizza by first making that simple salad and getting some iron in my diet along with the dairy and starch.  See how that works?)

So read romance novels or Twilight or any other books that some tweed-wearing douche would dismiss as sub-literate.  But maybe try to balance that from time to time with a more challenging book.  It feels good.  It’s good for you.  It may force you to consider lives, ideas, and occurrences outside your comfort zone, but that is also good for you.  It creates empathy, understanding, a more thoughtful mind. 

And to those who solely read big, difficult books translated from Hungarian containing more commas than periods per paragraph: maybe lighten up once in a while and remember those early days when you first read for pleasure and how much fun a well crafted, nicely plotted book can be. 

The balance.  The goddamn balance. 

Okay, more soon, like next year, as that is how long it may take me to read ten pages of The Wake.