Examining the Exagmination

Week 4, April 19-26, pages 44-56

“The best way to approach Finnegans Wake is in a group.  It has to be stalked like a wild animal, and you need a hunting party.” – Robert Anton Wilson

I’ve already written about the need for a guide for Finnegans Wake. Participating in a reading group, as Robert Anton Wilson recommends, or co-writing a blog also helps. But not everyone is lucky enough to be in a book club of Wake-heads who perform a weekly read. So for most, there are the many books and articles and websites about FW, all adding their own voices to the elucidation of this shadowy text.

What you soon discover is that reading FW is also about reading about FW. Discussing the book may require you to say, “Campbell says…” or, “Tindall suggests…” or, “Bishop argues…” As much as these critics can provide insight, the competing theories and points of view can confound in their own ways, dragging you into inescapable whirlpools of their singular interpretations. You find yourself searching outside the bounds of FW for that one perspective that will make everything clear, the one, “That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain of your useless and pointless knowledge.”

Of course, Finnegans Wake cannot be reduced to a single interpretation. Indeed, that may be the truest statement we can make about the book. So you end up reading as many sources of criticism as you can get your hands on, always on the lookout for a new approach or theory.

I’ve been using William York Tindall’s guide, and no doubt it’s been helpful, but I don’t always want or need the close reading he provides.  Tindall’s guide, like Joseph Campbell’s A Skeleton Key, is in some ways a translation of the Wake into plain English, along with all the problematic elements of any translation.  For me, through the 40+ pages I’ve read of the actual book, broader discussions of theme and character are more exciting. And since I’m constantly searching for essays on FW,  it’s mildly surprising that it took me this long to read the first and most famous collection of Wake criticism, the Exagmination.  

Joyce referred to FW as Work in Progress throughout the many years of laboring on it. He published fragments of his experiment in literary journals starting in 1924, and immediate critical reaction of Joyce’s new piece ranged from, “I don’t really get where this is going,” to, “Dude, what the fuck is this?”

In 1929 – that is a full ten years before the publication of the finished text of Finnegans Wake—a group of intellectuals, academics and friends of James Joyce published a collection unfortunately titled Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress. Samuel Beckett, William Carlos Williams, Frank Budgen, Eugene Jolas, and Stuart Gilbert were among the close personal acquaintances of Joyce who leapt to the defense of the Work in Progress. The idea of “friends of the author” coming to his defense as a valid form of literary criticism is more than a little outdated.  Be that as it may, twelve essays in all defended the work, along with two “letters of protest,” just to keep things balanced.

Clearly, defending a book that is still ten years from publication is nothing short of nuts. But remember, Joyce had published the masterpiece Ulysses to great acclaim, and people wanted to know if he’d come back with Ulysses Part II.  Joyce, though, was hard at work on the even more difficult follow-up album that would divide his fanbase.

The Exagmination touts itself as the words of those who are intimate with Joyce, those who know what this mysterious new Work in Progress is really about.  In fact, there’s reason to believe this collection was prompted by Joyce himself, looking to get by with a little help from his friends. Why Joyce wasn’t able or willing to make his intentions clear within his actual text, why he needed the appearance of secondary texts before the primary text was even completed—well, that’s a matter for another debate.

Although the essays in Exagmination didn’t completely turn the tide of public opinion, they do contain some wonderful writing.  Included is the first published work from Samuel Beckett, called, “DANTE… BRUNO. VICO… JOYCE.” Beckett and Joyce had a close relationship, and Beckett’s impassioned defense of his mentor’s evolving masterpiece is a must-read.

And Beckett is passionate. Check out this passage, which is both overly defensive and a really useful way to think about Joyce’s use of language:

And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. This rapid skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of copious intellectual salivation. The form that is an arbitrary and independent phenomenon can fulfil no higher function than that of stimulus for a tertiary or quartary conditioned reflex of dribbling comprehension.

“Copious intellectual salivation”? Excellent, Mr. Beckett. But his point about form and content becomes even more convincing when he sounds slightly less wounded about the mean things people are saying about his pal.

Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read -—- or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.

Ah, now that is some grist for the intellectual mill. “When the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep,”
says Beckett. “When the sense is dancing, the words dance.” I love that. It really gives you a feel of what reading the Wake can be like. At times, you’re picking up on meanings but struggling to make sense of them on any rational level. The erasure of the line between form and content may be one of the clues to relieve this tension in the reader’s mind. I don’t always care that the section I’m reading is based on an obscure Sumerian myth, but I can always think back to Beckett’s words and use them to find something, in whichever current I am swimming in FW.

This essay is also the first to explicate the relationship of Joyce’s work to the philosophy of Giambattista Vico. All this stuff about the cycles of human history, the recirculation of myth, and (with capital letters) Religion, Society, History—all this comes from Vico, and provides a basic framework upon which the Wake can be structured. Without Beckett, who knows how long it would have taken before someone made the connection?

Despite this, I must admit Beckett’s piece has plenty of challenges.  First of all, it’s a tough read. For an article that is trying to provide context for a book that’s so hard to read, Beckett’s article is, well, rather hard to read. He’s a fantastic stylist, but he’s happy to give us chunks of Latin and Italian without any summation or translation, assuming his reader is fluent enough to follow along. He plows through references and theories without slowing for a breath. That’s not bad, necessarily—it’s just tough to keep up sometimes.

Beckett also tosses us a racial slur in the second sentence which is all the more egregious for the casual and unnecessary way it’s used. Sure, it was the 1920s, but it’s still tough for the modern eye to take. That same word appears several times in Ulysses, and of course in many other classics of literature. But I couldn’t link to “Dante… Bruno. Vico… Joyce” without acknowledging how jarring its appearance can be.

While the Exagmination as a whole doesn’t hold up to the best Wake criticism (after all, FW wasn’t even half done at that point), it will always be the first. Every curious Wake explorer should check out the essays, especially for the Beckett piece.

Final point for today: last week, I shared a few phrases from my toddler that immediately screamed Finnegans Wake to my tainted ear.  Here’s another good one.  When trying to explain that a clock on the wall was not making an audible tick-tock noise, he proclaimed, “That clock is not clocking.” Now tell me that wouldn’t fit into chapter three somewhere!