13

I’m about seven pages away from finishing Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas, one of the books I’m reading this year along with my slow wade through the verbal mud that is Finnegans Wake.  My plan was to read some books during the times I was taking my break from the Wake.  Of course, my other plan was to read 13 pages of the Wake a week, which I did for a while, then stopped doing, then played catch up over the summer allowing me to now be ahead of schedule, slightly.  We all know that making plans is the surest way to make god laugh.         

Dublinesque seemed an ideal book to read during this my year of the Wake.  It focuses a lot on Joyce, Dublin, Beckett, and, mostly, the state of publishing.  Still, I am not very excited by this book.  I do love other books by Vila-Matas, though my fondness for them alternates. Bartleby & Co. is fantastic.  I immediately followed it up with Montano’s Malady, which I found rather dull.  A few years later, I decided to give EVM another shot and read Never Any End to Paris, a great read that got me excited for Dublinesque.  And here I am blogging instead of reading seven pages that will allow me to begin a new book and more the hell on. 

To be fair, Montano’s Malady and Dublinesque are fine books, certainly worth reading.  They, like all of the Vila-Matas works I’ve read or read about, are very much for literary geeks, springboarding from the works of others.  (Savvy readers will recognize that “Dublinesque” is the name of a poem by Philip Larkin.)  They are certainly a lot of fun in that regard, though my ambivalence for some of his books may stem from this nagging feeling I’m having lately that interesting, cerebral ideas are not always enough to really make a book sing.  And I want to hear music. 

Finnegans Wake is the goddamn top example of a wild idea brought to its most extreme conclusion, the grandest instance of the infinite possibilities of the novel.  I dare say that even detractors have to admire the audacity of the thing.  Considering my admiration, awe, and, I’ll say it, love for this book, other literary experiments by other writers should be as pleasing.  But, of course, these other writers are not Joyce. 

I applaud ambition.  Many of my favorite books are wild and maddening and require a degree of patience.  These books—Three Trapped Tigers, Vilnius Poker, The Obscene Bird of Night, The Master and Margarita, The Sound and the Fury—are “difficult” in the sense that they break from linear story telling or are comprised of multiple narrators or they rely heavily on linguistic tomfoolery and couldn’t care less about plot.  But… I have to admit that there’s a lot to be said for straightforward books with engaging stories and well developed characters.  Writers like Pynchon and Perec are fantastic when they are fantastic, but (and this feels like a shocking confession) I find the ideas that drive their books to often be more interesting than the books themselves.  Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are larger than the conceptual underpinnings that have made them famous.  One gets the idea behind Ulysses pretty early: It all takes place on one day, the thoughts and experiences of these Dubliners are as epic as Homer— okay, fine, but that alone wouldn’t sustain readers for 700 and some pages.

I think Finnegans Wake is spoiling me.  It’s a challenge but the rewards make it worthwhile.  I may only comprehend the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg, but every page has provided amusement as well as bemusement.  It’s more than a well-executed experiment; it is a total work of art, an all-encompassing book with no beginning and no end.  And it has forced me to read in a way that no other book has, showing me my own possibilities.  Subsequently, rather than look for another book along these lines, I feel compelled to read more conventional books, as no other literary experiment will ever match the Wake.

12

While making dinner earlier this week, I decided to check out Thinky Pain, Marc Maron’s comedy special.  While cooking, I usually watch some comedy videos via Netflix streaming and it was more than time I checked out Maron’s neurosis parade.  One of my favorite bits had to do with Captain Beefheart.  Maron claims Beefheart’s music has always loomed over him, this intimidating thing he knows he is never going to understand, never going to posses the largeness of mind (paraphrase) to really comprehend, but he feels now, in his late 40s, that it's time to dive into the mad world of Beefheart.

This is how I feel about Finnegans Wake.  To borrow Maron’s phrase, I will never, ever have the largeness of mind to fully get what Joyce is up to in the Wake.  And that’s fine—I knew that going in.  But when Maron said that, well, I felt a kinship.  There are things in this world we will never fully get, but that’s no reason to steer clear of them.  Frankly, I feel sad for anyone who avoids the inexplicable.  

I’m about done with book I.  It’s that goddamn chapter 6, the quiz chapter, that really threw me.  In order to assail that fucking wall, I returned to the toolkit: the critical texts, the internet, all the efforts all these years devoted to decoding the Wake.  I’ve done well just reading the book without resorting to a lot of guides, but that chapter was too much.  And the guides proved helpful, but I’m determined to continue without them.  I think reading the book first then reading critical texts will prove more enjoyable.  I’ll likely miss out on a lot this way, but I have the rest of my life to dig back into the Wake.  I just want to get through it once before I set about the lifelong task of trying to make a modicum of sense out of this clusterfuck.

PS: I tried listening to Beefheart while Reading the Wake.  Big mistake.  That's flying too close to the sun.  

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.