Hi. Welcome to our book club...

Hi.  Welcome to our book club.  This year, we'll be reading James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

[pause]

Hahahahaha.

No, but for ser.  This year, give or a take weeks or even months, OM and I will be reading what is commonly described as the most impenetrable novel ever written - at a pace of 12 pages/week.  And we will be documenting that endeavor here.

OM gave a sketch of his experience with Joyce.  I'll give mine.

I studied Political Science in college, and went to law school.  In those seven years, I didn't read much fiction.  After that, I went to graduate law school (there is such a thing, fyi), and studied Constitutional Law and Linguistic Anthropology.  In that year, I still didn't read much fiction.  And then I did.

I read (past tense) alot.  The simplest explanation is that I missed school, and wanted to keep learning.  So I decided to fill a gap in my education by teaching myself how to read fiction.  Not just fiction, but literature - the stuff that I sort of intentionally skipped for 25 years.  I started with a real page-turner, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.  That took a while.  Was it pleasant?  Sometimes.  Was it practice?  Sure.  Over the course of five years or so, I plowed through as many "great books" as I could.  And always looming in the distance was Joyce's Ulysses.  For that, I needed to build some stamina.

First, I read A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.  It was ok.  I didn't understand most of it, but I liked what he did with words, and it was tackleably short  Then I read Dubliners, all short stories, which I loved.  Then Homer's The Illiad and The Odyssey to get some background on Odyssyeus/Ulysses.  Then I was ready.

Actually, I wasn't.  Nothing could have prepared me for the mind melt of that book.  It's so long and so difficult, and so easy to give up on, just in the Telemachus stuff.  Then comes Bloomsday.  Wow. Anyway, I finished it.  (I must not have hated it because I named my second son Ulysses - after the hero, the book, and a little boy in William Saroyan's The Human Comedy.)  I'm not sure how, in retrospect.  A reader's guide helped, but not enough.  I guess it was down to determination.

And so it will be for the Wake.

What have I done to build stamina?  Eh, not much, mostly slummed through weekly New Yorkers and superhero comics.  True story.  I don't read now like I used to.  I'm bogged down in DFW's Infinite Jest (only 200 pages left!), I'm loping through Dylan's autobiography, and I'm not enjoying Kim Gordon's memoir.  And I gave up on the new Thomas Pynchon, when the female protagonist gave some guy a footjob.  Oh, and I pretend to reread Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, trying to recontextualize it for a personal project and to scour it for lessons on how to be a better dad - or at least come to some understanding of bigger stuff, like parenthood and the weirdness of generational memory.    

OM and I are both parents.  And a part of our friendship lately has been based on trading kid stories.  But another part, a foundational part, has always been based on books and shared appreciation for certain authors that nobody really likes - Pynchon, DFW, and Joyce.  This project is dedicated to my far-away friend, who's about to be a dad (again).  And to my dad, who was a voracious reader, and who isn't anymore.

Godspeed, O.  Let's do this.

Week 0 - Getting Started

March 20, 2015, the first day of spring.  Seems as good a time as any to embark on an endeavor as exhilarating, suspect, foolhardy, and flat-out absurd as reading Finnegans Wake over the course of one year. And yet, here we are.

Yesterday, JF sent me a link to “Finnegans Wake: An Illustrated Panorama”: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/10/19/finnegans-wake-an-illustrated-panorama/

I replied that we should read the Wake, two pages a week for 10 years.  JF bargained me up to 12 pages a week, which will get us through the 628-page novel in approximately 52 weeks, give or take four pages.

I love reading James Joyce. My first encounter was through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man back in high school.  I found the opening pages ridiculous, and I read them out loud to a friend so we could have a good laugh during study hall.

“A moocow? And then he wets the bed? What is this crap?”

Likely, this is not an uncommon reaction among high-schoolers getting their first taste of Joyce. I stuck with it, though, and things got better, or perhaps I got better at reading what was there. When I finished, I felt a sense of pride and accomplishment at making my way through the novel, even if I didn’t always understand the thing.

Next came Dubliners, which I immediately loved. The stories are denser than they appear on first reading, but still accessible to the engaged reader.  “The Dead” is, to my mind, perfect. I read that story collection twice in school, and have dipped back into it many times since.

Ulysses beckoned.  Any English undergrad worth his salt needs to take a class on Ulysses. Reading and discussing Ulysses is the best way to get through that novel the first time around. I’ve re-read it on my own since, and most years I’ll read a chapter or two around Bloomsday, just cuz.

Basically, Ulysses is the best. You can obsess over a sentence, teasing out the meanings and allusions. You can marvel in the flow of the language. You can focus on the connection to Homer, or you can get lost in the geography of 1904’s Dublin. You can approach Ulysses in a thousand different ways.

Finnegans Wake, however, exists at the outer-ends of the solar system. Whereas Ulysses is famously difficult to read, Finnegans Wake is unreadable. At the very least, it’s not readable in the way we’re used to reading novels, even the most challenging ones. The easy explanation is that Finnegans Wake is about the nighttime, that the plot of the novel is a dream dreamt by the main character.  As a result, the novel unfolds in streams of dream logic.  Ulysses is the record of a single day; Finnegans Wake records a single night. Instead of standard English, Finnegans Wake is a mishmash of languages, puns, wordplay—a stretching of language until it snaps and breaks apart and you’re left with a handful of pieces and strands.

Well, that’s what I’ve heard, anyway. I’ve never read it.  I’ve picked it up in the bookstore and flipped through the pages.  I’ve read about quite a bit.  But I’ve never read it myself.

So we’re going to try.  Slow and steady.  My second child is due in a little over a month. I’ll be sleepwalking through life for several months, so what better time than now to tackle the famous novel of dream life?