The following is an email conversation involving two men -- let's call them Mutt (OM) and Jute (JF) -- discussing Finnegans Wake.
OM: So I just checked out your last blog post. First of all, I completely agree that the first five pages of chapter two were downright readable. Apparently it's one of the earliest sections he wrote. Of course, it doesn't stay readable for long. After the cad with the pipe shows up, and HCE stutters through a needless defense of his crime, things shift and twist, and it's hard to track all the movements.
I mentioned this a bit in my last post, but it feels like this is an area where Tindall isn't all that helpful. His close reading here doesn't work for me. I'm not saying he's wrong in his interpretations, necessarily, but he presents them as actual occurrences in the book.
E.g., the cad with the pipe, he takes HCE's wife to bed? Really? I'm reading this section as a lot of sexually charged, pent-up guilt. I can certainly see HCE feeling threatened that another, younger man would sleep with his wife, but is the cad's wife ALP? I don't know. But what feels more important to me is that the cad tells the HCE rumor to his wife, who tells it to her priest, and it expands from there.
My point is, it's a tricky thing Tindall's trying to do. He wants to explain, on a sentence-by-sentence basis, a section that is really about establishing a sense of HCE's guilt for an unspecified crime, the rumor of which is spreading and changing as it moves across Dublin from one gossiper to the next. The associations are so fluid that isolating and identifying every one becomes so messy.
Another example that you mention: "Hosty." This is God, Satan, and the host of pub. It's HCE, who already is every man anyway. The cup overfloweth. Is Tindall making things clearer here?
Just curious how you felt about that. Would you prefer general chapter summaries to the word-by-word breakdown you get from Tindall?
JF: I'm not sure what I expected from Tindall, but I'm sorta over- and underwhelmed by the guide at this point.
The over has to do with the text of FW itself. It's so dense, so filled with external and internal associations beyond my education or experience that line-by-line, much less paragraph-to-paragraph, I have trouble following anything like character or plot. Character is unique in this book b/c it's not fixed - HCE and ALP and the kids are a lot of people at the same time, but never fully sketched - the way people often are in dreams. Plot is nonexistent - the way, again, it often is in dreams. Those qualities make general chapter summaries, aside from the cryptic ones I mentioned last week, difficult. So the guide helps tether me to something close to meaning, albeit Tindall's meaning, which is several steps away JJ's meaning, which (see my Week 0 post) isn't definitive. Without that rope, I'd be spinning my wheels more than I already am, and not getting much of anything out of this endeavor.
Curious. Did you use a guide for Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow? I did for both, and found them quite helpful in giving me some sense of the authors' culturally contextualized references that I would have otherwise missed. But those are different novels, right? Tindall, as you say, is in a tougher position, trying to manage the references on a baseline level and apply them on a higher level, up where JJ uses them.
I do like the microscopic attention that Tindall gives the text. If I'm underwhelmed, it's b/c I'd like a little more depth to some of what he's saying. He hits the points that he deems important, and that he thinks serve the bigger picture. Sometimes there are sentences or even phrases that I'd like him to cover, and he doesn't. Maybe it comes down to style. Sometimes it seems like he's speed talking. I guess I'd like him to slow down, so he can break it down more clearly.
OM: I used a guide for Gravity's Rainbow, but I read Ulysses in college, so I had a professor and a class of English major undergrads all reading along together.
But the biggest difference between those novels and Finnegans Wake is this: both GR and Ulysses can be difficult to follow, can be disorienting, can be overwhelming in the depth and scope of their references and allusions. And yet, you can read them. Most sentences make sense on their own. You may be unsure how it fits into the larger whole, or you may be unsure what place and time you're inhabiting, or you may not even be able to tell if it's a dream or reality.
In Finnegans Wake, though, most sentences do not make sense without digging deeper and picking up on the references. You need to know these things or you don't have any ground on which to stand. You can't just plod along and hope to pick up the thread later.
That's why I keep saying that reading FW is as much about reading the existing criticism as it is about reading the novel itself.
JF: Agreed on U and GR. The words (definitionally) and the sentences (syntactically - is that the right word?) make sense most of the time. Neither is true for FW.
I do find myself in plod-and-hope mode quite a bit. Then again, I'm not rereading as much as you are. I'll go back to the text if Tindall mentions something that I just didn't see at all, or if I underlined something to revisit. But I usually enjoy the weird weightlessness of reading the text. The art and the craft of what JJ is doing is pretty amazing to me.
If I miss a lot, and if Tindall is less than helpful, that's ok. I'm gonna stick with him.
OM: I'm considering going forward from here without a guide. Is that madness? Is that parachuting without a parachute?
JF: You're like the lit-snob version of those insane dudes who free-climbed El Capitan. That huge granite rock face? It's called Finnegans Wake.
OM: Pfft, those guys used ropes?
JF: It was more like twine. Or maybe a really thick string. And it was for talking, mostly, into paper cups connected by the string.
Uh. I just realized that I'm at the other end of your string. You're totally screwed. I got the gear (or the guide), but I don't know what I'm doing.
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