A Guide In Hand

There is no agreement as to what Finnegans Wake is about, whether or not it is “about” anything, or even whether it is, in any ordinary sense of the word, “readable.” – the first sentence of the introduction of my copy of Finnegans Wake

Sometimes it’s hard to ask for help. As an adult, you’re supposed to be able to do things on your own—find a job, take care of your finances, cultivate healthy relationships, not fall victim to addiction and vice, and a bunch of other stuff probably.  Truth is, though, everyone needs help. Doing everything on your own isn’t the smartest or most efficient way to deal with all the weirdness of life.

This applies to literature, too. People love reading together. In fact, people who are in book clubs read more than people who aren’t in book clubs. (N.B.—I’m not sure that is a fact. I actually just made it up. It could be true.)

Finnegans Wake, more than any other piece of literature, is not meant to be a solo journey.  Thankfully I have JF along for the ride, but we don’t want to simply hold hands and drown together. We both prepped for the journey by first reading through some essays and intro materials, i.e., those links hanging out on the right of the blog. There you’ll find broad character sketches, discussions of underlying themes and influences, and even a few ideas about plot.

I figured that’d be enough to get started.  I wanted to keep an open mind. Not be overly influenced by someone else’s view. Let the novel dictate how I read. Go with the flow—or maybe the “riverrun,” as the Wake famously begins.

So I opened up FW and got started. What this means is, I read the words on the page, left to right, one at a time, and did my best to understand them, individually and collectively.  You know, as one does when reading.

It was confusing.

I read a few sentences that sparked suggestions of meaning.  I re-read those sentences. Sometimes I read them out loud. A few times, I read sentences out loud in my best Irish accent (this was a surprisingly productive approach, truth be told).

I found a lot of things to enjoy: the rhythm and flow of the language, that moment when a multi-layer pun revealed itself, even a joke. Yes, I got my first good audible laugh, which came at the end of a sequence which (I later found out) is known as the “Museyroom episode.” This section consists of three rambling pages of an odd recreation of the battle of Waterloo (and so much more), presented as a guided tour through the Willingdone Museyroom (i.e., the Wellington Museum in London), at the end of which we step outside into the “keling” air, and Joyce drops in a one-word paragraph:

Phew!

I exhaled with a genuine smile.  Phew, indeed.

Still, we have only just begun. There’s a long way to go. So I picked up a guide.  FW has spawned many reader’s guides, among the earliest and most famous being Joseph Campbell’s A Skeleton Key and William York Tindall’s A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake. JF decided to go with the Tindall, so I followed suit and found a free online version of the same.

And I’m fine with that. Sir Edmund Hillary didn’t climb Mount Everest alone. He needed a Sherpa guide.  So if Finnegans Wake is the Everest of literature, why shouldn’t I make use of a guide? No shame here. William York Tindall, you can be my Tenzing Norgay.

What the guide does is provide a compass. There is no earthly way to know every allusion or symbol that Joyce packed in—the guide doesn’t even pretend to know everything. More than that, the layering of language that occurs within its pages may never be matched (nor should it be?), and the number of valid interpretations has no end. But broad ideas help.  Reading someone who has already worked out a framework for understanding the text provides, if not exactly solid ground, at least a glimpse of the shore in the distance.

For example, the main character is HCE. He is sometimes named H.C. Earwicker.  He is, or possibly he represents, the person who is dreaming the dream-novel. He is the head of a family, with a wife, two sons, and a daughter. Because this is a dream, identities shift and modulate, so H.C. Earwicker assumes many names and forms.

But look out for the initials “HCE.” One of the many ways FW signals the presence of the main character are variations on those letters. Sometimes it’s called out explicitly, as in “Here Comes Everybody,’’ or “Horoun Childeric Eggeberth.” Other times it’s more subtle, as when he is referred to as, “this man of hod, cement and edifice,” (i.e., he’s a builder).

The very first sentence of the book, in fact, tells us that we are returning to a place called, “Howth Castle and Environs.” Howth Castle is a real place in Dublin, so we’re being told about the geographic location of the action, as well as getting our first hint that HCE is one of our central concerns.

I don’t know how long it would’ve taken me to figure that out on my own.  But now that I have the compass, I know what to do when the needle points to “HCE.” I reflect on what I know of HCE, and the words around him come into focus.

It’s gonna be a long year, isn’t it?

For now, I’ve decided to use the guide in this way: Read the weekly 12 pages first, circle back and read through the guide, then read the 12 pages a second time. The guide, which I’ve only briefly glanced at so far, makes for pretty compelling reading itself. In fact, the secondary materials on FW are so extensive, and vary so greatly, that we could spend all our time talking about the interpretations of the text.  What we talk about when we talk about talking about Finnegans Wake.