Then he falls off a ladder and dies. And at his wake, somebody spills whiskey on his lips, and he comes back to life. Traditional Irish folk song, and a springboard in some ways for the Wake. Initial obvious observation? The song title is possessive; the book title isn't. F'sW vs. FW. Finnegans, like a family - or Finnegans everywhere, because poor Tim is an everyman - wake? After, hm, a night's sleep? Cmon. That's just googling the song, and riffing on the title. Easy peasy.
This week I didn't do much on the Wake. I looked at it a few times - actually, I stared at it sitting on the dining room table for a while before shaking my head. While waiting for William York Tindall's A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake to show up from Amazon, I read four pieces of various lengths and qualities about the book.
First, I read Ted Gioia's "The Adventurer's Guide to Finnegans Wake." Pretty overview-y.
Second, I read Allen Ruch's "Finnegans Wake" on The Modern Word website. More in-depth, and a series of Q&A's that sometimes try a little too hard to be witty. Still, there's some substance there, particularly when Ruch talks about FW having a charming, postmodern self-awareness of its own difficulty that makes it about itself and all texts, "as well as the acts of writing, printing, publishing, reading, glossing, annotating, and criticism." But that self-awareness (not to mention that difficulty) comes from Joyce or JJ, as I'll probably call him in this blog. A key sentence: "[I]t's important to remember that Finnegans Wake is still a work of literature, the creation of a waking mind, and has therefore been carefully planned out." But Ruch also advises against trying to make conscious sense of the language and narrative, and for approaching the book with a relaxed and receptive mind. There's an internal tension to those statements, in which authorial intent is at once celebrated and dismissed. I'll get to that issue later.
Third, I read Michael Chabon's "What to Make of Finnegans Wake" from the New York Review of Books. It's great, and I actually recommend it aside from the subject--the guy's an amazing writer. Chabon talks alot about realism and modernism, and JJ's struggle with finding a language to represent unconsciousness. He closes, "The limits of language are not the stopping point, says the Wake, they are the point at which we must begin to tell the tale." Kinda like that idea.
Fourth, and finally, I read John Bishop's Introduction to the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics Edition of the Wake. (I described this to OM as the one with the pale green spine. It's the one we're using to make discussion easier.) This is probably the most helpful, and the least objective, piece. It describes (or tries to) the "plot" of FW. Basically, an old man, who may or may not exist within the book is dreaming about his family and events in his life. In the dream, he takes on the name Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, and his wife takes on the name Anna Livia Plurabelle. So anytime in the book that JJ uses words starting with h, c, and e together, it's a reference to Earwicker, and anytime that he uses words starting with a, l, and p together, it's a reference to Anna. The couple have three children, a daughter and two sons.
Ok. No more spoilers. I haven't even started the book, and you guys aren't going to, but I do have a rather substantial bone to pick with Bishop.
The issue is the one of intentionality that Ruch touched on. An early draft of this post did, too, riffing on the idea that whether FW is completely impenetrable (and I'm still hopeful enough to assume it isn't), JJ intended it to say precisely what it says. I didn't complete the circle there, but I will here. It's where I part ways with Bishop. Either Barthes' views in "The Death of the Author," which Bishop mentions unflatteringly thrice in a single paragraph (and by extension Foucault's views in "Who Is the Author?" which Bishop doesn't mention - although, trust me, the former makes a stronger or at least more coherent case than the latter) are valid, or they're fucking not. Their merit doesn't rest on the difficultly of the work. That is, just because JJ took 17 years to finish this really difficult to write and to read book doesn't mean his opinion about "what it means" is entitled to any deference. It's entitled to zero, and I think he'd agree. (Here, my lack of preparation shows because I'm guessing some lit grad student, who's super into this, could Horshack in here rn and tell us about a letter sent or a comment made by JJ to...um...hold on...Bishop dropped his name, but so did the others...Jacques Mercanton? that the damn book is about everything and nothing at the same time, which would make definitive interpretation sorta beside the point.) So when Bishop poo-poos Barthes and deconstructionism, it seems like it's coming the perspective of somebody who wants to figure it out, and assumes there's something to figure out.
Sure, there's something to figure out. Duh. Somebody as smart as JJ doesn't spend that much time on a meaningless endeavor. But is it his meaning that matters? Or mine? Or OM's? Or ours as a book club of two? We may need help (ahem, Tindall) to wade through the wack verbiage and allusions, and we definitely need each other for encouragement. But we don't need somebody else's viewpoint. I don't want to speak for O, but I actually don't give a rat's ass if I understand much of this book. I'll understand as much as I can. And I'll feel better for that, than I would from fitting my take into a paradigm constructed by a guy who hates on Barthes, three times. (I mean, really. Blogger doesn't have an emoticon of a heart punch, but if it did...Roland, you're my boy, much love.)
This is actually fundamental stuff, what I'm ranting about. (For the one person who's reading this: Sorry, dude. I'll wrap this up soon.) It bears on each and every one of us, tied as we are to e-communication on lighted screens. Does your reading of an email matter more than than the sender's intent? Does your "like" of somebody's post square with why they put that up, as a congruent whole, or does it seem more like a venn diagram? Well, I like the idea of that post, and I like that person, and liking is easy, so yeah - thumbs up. But I haven't read it? Or thought about it? And if I did...uhh, social network paralysis. Haha.
Ok, so, yeah. The point is this: Eff the author, eff JJ. He's long dead. Even if I had a question about what he wrote, I couldn't even ask him. And if I could, I might scrap with him about it because, once he finished, it wasn't what he wrote, it's what I read. Simple.
Dismount soapbox.
OM and I haven't really discussed ground rules for this thing. I think we generally agree on the 12-page limit. I can't speak for him, but I'm observing that strictly. End of the 12th page, mid-sentence or not, I put the book down like an SAT test pencil. There may be rereading, or reading in the guide, to do, sure. But I'm not going to make that more of chore by pushing the page limit.
Oh, and I tried to tinker with the look of the blog. (The Finnegan drawing above would make a great header.) That's beyond me right now, but I'll keep trying. And if anyone wants in, now is the time. Feel free to join us and grow your brain. There isn't a single person, conversant in English, who can't do this. It's 12 pages/week. And there are smart people whom I know that might enjoy the challenge. (Side-eye to the JF and the RK.) My email address is probably in my profile, along with a sweet topless pic of me from 2010 when I was trying to get somebody to pay attention to me. If not, it's jafreitag@gmail.com. Let me know.
Next week: Pages 1-12.
Update: The guide just showed up. Tidall has an intro, too, ugh. So I have to finish that? Frankly, I'm sick of people previewing the book. Week 1 starts on Sunday. More later...
Peace,
JF
[Note: This post was mostly finished before Week 1, which ended on Easter. I apologize for the late finish and publish. Fwiw, I am done with the first 12 pages, and I will comment briefly upon them soon.]
No comments:
Post a Comment