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?