Joyce's 628-Page Dad Joke

Are puns the lowest form of humor? Why is it that after we make a pun, we often find it necessary to apologize?

“Sorry about that. Couldn’t help myself.”

Let’s be honest, puns are dad jokes, aren’t they?

"What do you call a belt made out of a watch? A waist of time."

There’s something about the way a pun twists in on itself, and away from the outside world, that makes most right-thinking people groan. The pun is simply about language. It’s not a joke about anything but itself. Once I make a pun, I’m no longer talking to you about something, I’m talking about the words I’m using to talk to you.

The lifespan of the pun is miniscule. It is alive only for that split-second it takes for your brain to solve the linguistic puzzle, and then snap, the pun is dead. Watch, waist, waste, time… Ugh. Clever, but fleeting. Quick, but without real depth.

Perhaps that’s why tabloid newspapers adore the pun so much.

I bring this up because I’m about 260 pages into Finnegans Wake, a novel which is based entirely on word play. My unofficial estimate is that 95% of the words printed on the pages of this book exhibit some sort of word play. Hell, 95% is probably low. It’s puns all the way down!

Does this make Finnegans Wake the world’s longest and most frustrating dad joke? Um, sort of? Let’s be honest, there is a lot of humor in these pages, and much of it is silly and sophomoric.

But (you just knew there was going to be a “but,” didn’t you?) this is James Joyce, so these aren’t just simple puns. The words in this book often exhibit several layers of punning. The book doesn’t take a half-step away from the world (as most puns do). Joyce keeps going, pushing the limit of how much meaning he can pack into each word and phrase and sentence and chapter.

Coiling in on itself, Finnegans Wake begins to emerge on the far side. Joyce takes the stuff of this world, bends and twists it as far as he can with the tools at his disposal, and ultimately ends up with a completely new universe, one that exists through a refraction of linguistic representation.

I’ve read that Joyce packed the history of the world into Finnegans Wake. I’m not sure that’s entirely true. I think he recreated the history of the world, and ended up with something that echoes our universe, but is totally and completely unique at the same time.

And he did it all with the lowest form of humor. Pretty neat trick.

Book I Clickbait (JF)

OM did a Book I recap, so I'll do one, too. I don't have nine points (was that some tether into FW? I don't remember many nines), only three. And if you multiply three by something, and add something to that, you get 1,001. For example, 3 x 333 + 2.  Joycean math, right? And 1,001 = ALP. Uh-huh. I think that's on line 17 of...hey, Tindall, which page is that number thing?

Anyway.

1.  I've gotten better at reading FW. Better's normally the first-step superlative of good, but it's also a relative to other adjectives. Check it out. "Anna, I've been a good husband, and I can be an even better one," vs. "Anna, I've been a bad husband, but I can be a better one." See what I did there?

On this project, I tend toward the latter better. There have been a lot of passages or segments, and posts about them, where I've been a bad reader (on the blog, that's where I whine and lean on Tindall). Not intentionally bad, but still bad. I've improved. And, hey, that's pretty cool. As I tell my kids, it's the hardest book ever written in English, even though most of it is not really written in English.  #natlanguage

2.  I'm daunted by the next howevermany pages. OM got bogged down a few chapters ago, and we texted and emailed about that. He's an avid reader; I used to be. This book often makes him want to quit and read something else, and it makes me want to do the same. Thanks to FW, I've remembered how much I love reading and writing. But, gotdam, I'd sure love to be reading almost anything else for the next eight months or so, and writing my own stuff in my all-too-little personal time. Maybe that's the best compliment about FW? It makes me want to absorb and create.

Those pages? Ugh. I'm behind, way behind - 24 pages on this Sunday. Book II is supposed to really suck, too, and I have an almost stepkid packing and moving to college this weekend. And the fifth anniversary of the first date with my gf is Friday.  (What do you get as a present for that, btw?  Pretty sure it's not a AYITW post, haha. Flowers, maybe?  Ugh, I always do flowers on Fridays.  No ... holy shit ... wait. I got it. Shhh.) Super hectic real life. Then again, when Shem and Shaun moved out, and Izzy followed the Ren Faire people, it must've been nertz.

3.  You. You guys, who are reading this. You guys, who seem to give a shit about this wack-ass thing that me and my too-far-away, new-father-again friend are doing. Yeah. His wife and my gf don't care much about this; they don't read the blog or share the tweets, but you do? You Twitter followers are sort of real to me. Weird? Not really. I'm pretty excited when I get a notification that another person is paying attention, or when I see our pageviews and learn that a person in Portugal is into this. So great. As OM mentioned in his most recent post, JJ would be proud to know that this book has united us. Maybe, because of that connection, this post isn't complete click-bait.

Oh. The header image?  It's Danis Rose, not Susan Sontag.  Mystery solved, and what I wouldn't give if Sue left notes on the Wake for us.  What I wouldn't give to spend a day with her - young/old, healthy/sick - and talk about lit and the content/context debate?

Anyway, redux.

More soon.

Music: From Newsom to Burgess and Beyond

Yesterday, Joanna Newsom released a video for a new song, "Sapokanikan." The song will be on her new album, Divers, and since its her first release since 2010, I went searching to see if I could find any more information. That's when I came upon this tidbit in a LA Times review of the song:

In the video for Joanna Newsom’s first new work in five years, “Sapokanikan,” the harpist-pianist-singer-composer-actor strolls through Manhattan in long takes while singing kaleidoscopic lyrics. Around her the city sparkles. As she moves, Newsom stares into the camera and offers a vivid recounting of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.” ... Just kidding about that last part. 

Ah, can you only imagine if Joanna Newsom had decided to set Finnegans Wake to harp and glockenspiel?

Of course, there have been actual attempts to capture the music of FW. Is there anything stranger than this video of Anthony Burgess singing "The Ballad of Perse O'Reilly"?



The caption of the video states, "Finding himself happily locked in the pub after closing time, Burgess sings from The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly (from Joyce's Finnegans Wake)."  There's something distinctly creepy about this one.

Far more interesting for me is the project of Waywords and Meansigns. From the website's description: "Waywords and Meansigns is an unabridged musical version of James Joyce's famous text, Finnegans Wake. The book has been divided its 17 chapters, with a different musician or performance group assigned to each chapter."

Allowing each artist to interpret a chapter in his or her own way captures the essence of Finnegans Wake. This is the famous Work in Progress, a text so alive that you can encounter the word "googling" in a book written some 60+ years before anyone used Google to search for something. Stranger still, Joyce seems to be using the word correctly.



Above is the first chapter of Book II of FW by way of Waywords and Meansigns, and it gives you a good taste of what the project is all about. I think this is something Joyce himself would've got on board with!

I Finished Book One of Finnegans Wake – Now What?

Book One of Finnegans Wake is done, and I’ve already begun wading into Book Two. This means, at 230-ish pages down, we have a mere 400 or so pages to go.  Now seems like a good time for some general thoughts.

1. Book One, comprised of eight chapters, feels like a complete piece. Of course, it’s intended to be the first of the four cycles, so this shouldn’t be a shock. Still, I wonder what else Joyce could have up his sleeve.
2. The first two chapters of Book Two are reportedly two of the hardest chapters in the novel. It’s unclear how they could be more difficult than several of the previous sections, of which I understood basically zero percent. How can you understand less than nothing of a text? And yet, I don’t really doubt that Joyce pulls it off. He probably figured out a way to remove knowledge from your brain or something. (ed. note—20 pages or so into Book Two now, and it IS exceedingly difficult.)
3. I’m done with Tindall. In all honesty, I haven’t consulted him since Chapter 6 anyway. He writes as though he is the only authority on the text, but the more I’ve read and the more I understand about Finnnegans Wake, the less I agree with the old codger. Most damningly, the Finnegans Wake you can read about in Tindall is less interesting than the Finnegans Wake I’m holding in my hands. I don’t need someone to make this less interesting for me.
4. There must be a thousand and one other sources to consult. On the website Original Positions, a blogger recorded his thoughts on each chapter of FW as he read, and I’ve found this to be more enjoyable than dusty ole Tindall. Obviously, the OP blog doesn’t capture a fraction of what’s to be found in the book, but he makes some broad strokes that I find compelling.
5. I prefer my commentary on Finnegans Wake to grapple with the text, not try to dominate it. Remember that Joyce called this book Work In Progress as it was being written. This was not Joyce being lazy. He wasn’t saying, “Oh, I’ll think of a title when it’s done.” He meant that this new work was alive. Reading it will be an active process for as long as people dare to read it. Finnegans Wake will always be In Progress.
6. The first episode of the Reading Finnegans Wake podcast was posted shortly after A Year in the Wake began. The podcast performs a very close reading of the text, unpacking the various meanings to be found in single lines. Although I’m far ahead of the reader at this point, the podcast still sheds light on elements that I missed. If you’re not aware, Finnegans Wake is NOT a linear novel, so deepening my understanding of Chapter One has repeatedly enhanced my readings of later segments.
7. However, if I need a close reading of a segment in a later chapter, both this glossary and this wiki offer interpretations at the cellular level. Sometimes a new perspective on a single word can unlock an entire section. 
8. This whole book messes with my brain. Last night I read a bit before turning out the light, and spent 20 or so minutes thinking about what I’d read before falling asleep. That quiet thinking about Finnegans Wake took over my mind, and didn’t let go even after I’d fallen asleep. I woke up multiple times in the night feeling like the words in my head were scrambled. How ironic that this book, which many claim is Joyce’s attempt to reconstruct the night, actually makes it more difficult to sleep if I get too immersed in the text.
9. Finally, I’m not really overwhelmed by the 400 pages, or the three Books, or the nine chapters remaining. What’s daunting is the thought that I’ll still be reading 12 pages a week come February. Miles to go before I sleep!

László Moholy-Nagy's Diagram of Finnegans Wake

László Moholy-Nagy.  (Phonetic: Laz-lo Ma-ho-li Naj.)  Ever heard of him?

Amazing man, amazing artist.  Hungarian-Jew, born 1895, converted to Calvinism, fought in WWI for Austro-Hungary, supported communism, moved to Germany in 1920, taught at the Bauhaus, moved to England in 1935, moved to Chicago in 1937, taught at the New Bauhaus (later the Institute of Design or ID before Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan) in Chicago, drew a weird diagram of FW and died in 1946.

That's it up there.  Kinda cool, mainly because the guy who made it is a modernist visual art icon, and, b/c I'm an ID fan and completely geek-into Siskind and Callahan, an influence on me.  (Influence more photography-wise, back when I used to do that, than writing-wise.)  Idk how helpful it is in reading the actual book.  It's not unhelpful, I guess.

Hope you're all having great weekends.

More soon.

I Walk Through Walls, I Float Down the Liffey

O

tell me all about

Anna Livia! I want to hear all

So begins Chapter 8 of Finnegans Wake. This is the final chapter of the Book I of the novel, and it's in this chapter that we cross the magical 200-page marker (ed. note -- there is nothing particularly magical about 200 pages). Chapter 8 is known as "Anna Livia Plurabelle," for it's in this chapter that the lens finally focuses on HCE's wife. 

Thanks, Google!

It's also perhaps the novel's most well-known chapter. When I typed "Finnegans Wake chap..." into Google, it appears as Google's fourth suggestion. Chapter 1 comes up first, but I guess that's due to all the English undergrads who've decided they're ready to take on the Wake, get to page 6, and then decide they better find out what the heck is happening in Chapter 1. Considering how many people bail on this after only a few pages, let's say that at least Chapter 8 is the second-most read chapter in the book.

So why do people care about so much about "Anna Livia Plurabelle"? For starters, the gimmick of the chapter is a neat one. Joyce worked in the names of over 350 rivers into the text. The character ALP is the river Liffey (aka the River Anna Liffey -- Abhainn na Life in Irish). Anna Livia Plurabelle is an important character, no doubt.  Heck, the novel begins with the word "riverrun." Now look back at the top -- the chapter opens with the Greek letter delta (Δ). Oh, hey, a river delta. Cool.

Statue of Anna Livia Plurabelle

The action here concerns two old washerwomen, wringing out laundry on the banks of the river. They chatter and gossip and tell the story of ALP.  One of the pervading ideas is that these two women are washing away the sins of the world ("the dneepers of wet and gangres of sin in it!"). In another sense, they are scrubbing at language, and Anna Livia is there to sweep everything away in her current. 

Perhaps another reason for its popularity? The entirety is around 20 pages long, making it fairly easy to excerpt and insert into whatever edition of "The Collected Works of James Joyce" or "The Essential Joyce" or "A Readers Guide to James Joyce" or what have you. Or maybe that's me being cynical.

For me, the best part may be the audio recording that exists of Joyce himself reading from the end of "Anna Livia Plurabelle." It was recorded in 1929 and gives a wonderful taste of how Joyce imagined the book to sound.  Hearing his sing-song Irish accent flow through the text is nothing short of glorious.

The video above has a slightly odd animation, but the audio is clear and the subtitles are a nice touch. You can sit back and listen to that recording without any context and, I think, enjoy the music of what you're hearing.

That gets to the heart of the matter, in fact. Finnegans Wake is a musical novel. I've written about it before, but reading it out loud is one of the best ways to attack the text. And because this chapter was written to flow like a river, it's develops a cadence that carries the reader along. 

Chapter 8 works quite well as a standalone piece of text, as long as you have a bit of context for what it's all about. In that sense, it's one of the pieces of FW that I'll likely return to after I've finished stabbing this beast with my steely knife sometime early next year. Well, I'm not going to immediately re-open the book to page 196, but perhaps I will  many years from now, when I want to remember what this project was all about.

And with that, I'll leave you with the final passage from "Anna Livia Plurabelle." Anna Livia has flooded her banks. The two gossiping washerwomen are fading from the story. One turns into a tree and one turns into a stone. It's quite beautiful. Listen to Joyce read it, or try it out loud for yourself. Either way, enjoy!

Can't hear with the waters of.  The chittering waters of.  Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk.  Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thoma Malone? Can't hear with the bawk of bats, all thim liffey-ing waters of.  Ho, talk save us!  My foos won't moos.  I feel as old as yonder elm.  A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia's daughter-sons.  Dark hawks hears us.  Night!  Night! My ho head halls.  I feel as heavy as yonder stone.  Tel me of John or Shaun?  Who were Shem and Suan the living sons and daughters of?  Night now!  Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm!  Night night!  Telmetale of stem or stone.  Beside the rivering waters of, highterandtithering waters of. Night!

Week 17 (JF) - Anna Livia Plurabelle

FW pp. 196-216

"Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle's to be."

Chapter VIII, which closes Book I, is about ALP.  Actually, lit scholars refer to this chapter as simply "Anna Livia Plurabelle."  ALP is often symbolized as water or a river, and JJ mentions plenty (according to Tindall, hundreds) of rivers here, but the most important one is the Liffey, which runs through Dublin.  According to Annala Rioghachta Eireann (Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland), a 1851 book by Cucogry O'Clery, the river was originally called Abhainn Liphthe in Gaelic, and became Anna-Liffey (check out the header image) in English.  Anna-Liffey became, in Joycenglish, Anna Livia.  Anna means river.  Livia means life - liv is Danish for life, and the Danish were ancient rulers of Ireland.  Plurabelle, I'm not sure.  A website that popped up on a quick search posited that "plurabelle" was Italian for most beautiful, but Google Translate doesn't support that.  Bella is Italian for beautiful, but I couldn't get a hit for anything in that language beginning with plur.  ALP is many faceted/peopled, though, so I'll guess that plura is somehow related to plural.  (JJ, after playing with numbers and mentioning "she had three figures to fill [Shem, Shaun, Issy] and confined herself to a hundred eleven," says, "They did her well to rechristen her Pluhurabelle.")  ALP, the multiply beautiful river of life.

River...river...river...hm.  Hasn't there been a river mentioned in FW before?  Well, yeah.  Chapter I starts with the word "riverrun."  And Chapter VIII ends with the line, "Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!"  Remember Giambattista Vico, the 18th Century Italian philosopher, whose ideas about the cyclical nature of history influenced JJ?  It doesn't get much more cyclical than starting and ending like that.  Also, the Mookse and the Gripes episode.  Those guys were by a river at some point, hanging out with washerwomen, right?  The washerwomen return, and, together from opposite banks, they gossip about ALP.

I know that I've described certain parts of FW as lyrical or singsong-y or even poetic, but this chapter is full-on poetry without the annoyingly helpful line breaks.  Tindall says it resembles one of T.S. Eliot's longer poems, "a triumph of sequence, rhythm, and sound," and, because it's directed to the ear, it calls for reading aloud.  It's framed by (and, unlike much of the book so far, tethered to some narrative ground by) a conversation between these two women.  One knows more than the other, so the phrase "tell me" recurs frequently: "Onon! Onon! tell me more.  Tell me every tiny teign.  I want to know ever single ingul."  I thought about Bakhtin/Volosinov, and whether JJ is working some sort of indirect speech angle.  Nope.  Aside from the women addressing each other, there's not much speech at all.  It's pure third-person storytelling, which is interesting in itself because JJ, forging this high-modern dream-speak nat-language, almost entirely abandons traditional interlocution between characters for something both less and more (think Greek drama, or even Homer/The Odyssey) traditional, something collective or choral.

I liked this chapter a lot, if that's not obvious so far.  I was over my head (as usual) with the references (Tindall helped a little bit), but comfortable with the flow.  (River, flow?  Get it?  Rimshot.  I'll be here all year.  Please try the veal.)  Anyway.  According to Tindall, this chapter has three loosely-marked parts.

The first part is short.  It's about ALP and HCE, and their marriage, as the washerwomen clean his/their now-familiar dirty laundry.  Tindall is great here on the links to Ulysses.  HCE's "wee follyo" (because wee = oui, or yes in French) is Ulysses - that book ends with Molly Bloom's famous "yes."

The second part is longer.  It begins around a second, and way different, version of ALP's letter found by the hen in the park ("trouved [trouvé is 'found' in French] by a poule [poulet is 'chicken' in French, and poule is 'slut' in French] in the parco").  Per Tindall, it's about the hen and a knapsack in which she has presents for her many (1,001) children.  I got the gifts - a huge list (pp. 210-12) that mentions all three kids, as well as Kate, the ALP stand-in from the museum tour much earlier.  But I got more from this part, which Tindall glosses over.  He's all about the hen and the presents and the children, and whom the children represent.  Meh.  What comes before the list is better, and - hey, I've been reading this book for months, so lemme go off for a sec - more important than Wild Bill makes it seem.  In this part, you get the washerwoman's view of ALP as a young woman, before she was married: "She must have been a gadabout in her day, so she must, more than most," with "a flewmen of her owen."  (Ohai, OM, lol.)  She was "just a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing, then, sauntering, by silvamoonlake," who was "oso sweet and so limber" or "the wiggly livvly."  I need to reread this part to set it still in my head, but I feel like this is ALP's sexual history, which kicks off with her losing her virginity to a priest?  Then she meets HCE, "Her Chuff Exquire," and it's all over.

There are two passages that I loved in this part: The descriptions of ALP on pp. 206-07 - "First she let her hair fal and down it flussed to her feet its teviots winding coils" - and on p. 208 - "She wore a ploughboy's nail studded clogs."  I haven't spent enough time with either of them, tbh (the lead-ins are both dense af), but there's something incredibly beautiful, sad, weird, lost-soul - "Everyone that saw her said the dowce little delia looked a bit queer" - about both.  The former, I don't understand at all, and the latter?  Is that her on her wedding day?  Tindall?  Completely useless to me on this.  (OM, I'd love to hear your take on pp. 202-09.  Fwiw, I may update this post, if I dig into this part, or I may just press ahead.)

The third part is about the washerwomen themselves and the river.  Tindall calls it "a hymn to renewal, the fall of night, death, and the living river."  It read, to me, as more frame-y - the same way that the last verses of Bob Dylan's "Black Diamond Bay" and the Grateful Dead's "Wharf Rat" is frame-y.  We told you somebody else's story, and now we'll talk about our view, so you can see who and where we are.  

Sometimes, though not often enough, Tindall nails it.  He posits, "Maybe Joyce is the Wake's only reader and, though other readers dare other readings, the only reader's guide."  And the best part?  You can listen for yourself.  Here's JJ in 1929 reading the end of Chapter VIII.  Wow.  "[E]very telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it."  Yep.  The washerwomen smack the clothes against the banks, and their conversation trails off - tbc in Chapter X, apparently.

I'm caught up, and we're 1/3 of the way through this thing.  Gj, O, and gl, us.  The next segment is gonna suck.

More soon.