Finnegans Wake

"Here comes everybody". James Joyce and Finnegans Wake

No, I have not read it. Some have. Supposedly Finnegans Wake is the most difficult book to read in the English language, and having dipped very briefly into its pages I would tend to agree. 

Reading of James Joyce, his long suffering wife, one Nora Barnacle, told of how when Joyce was writing the book she would hear him chuckling to himself long into the night. So it would seem that he at least understood the jokes. 

Nora and James - who is chuckling now?

There is a cheap ebook, "Finnegans Wake in 15 Minutes", which offers I would surmise some sort of "bluffers guide" for those seeking to convince others that they are that way inclined. Yes, cheap, but I will save my money.

Whatever, here is the very beginning of Finnegans Wake:- 

 riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Howth Castle - by which the riverruns

I do wonder how anyone could possibly proof read such a book. But leaving that aside, this strange half sentence is in fact the conclusion of the unfinished sentence that closes the book. Thus the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. Joyce, perhaps being of the same mind as William Blake - who said that he "must create a system or be enslaved by anothers" -sought to create a whole new vocabulary. Therefore he ran words into each other, words that lived, words of becoming, combining two thoughts (or more) at once.

A painting by William Blake

Off the top of my head, seeking to be creative and emulate Joyce, what about "agonversary"?  A word that perhaps captures the misery of 50 years of marriage, combining as it does both "agony" and "anniversary". But Joyce conjured up such words in a constant stream, weaving them into his story (I am  assured by some that there is in fact a story) and as I mentioned before, he chuckled his way through the night, humoured by his own inventiveness.

Consulting a Lexicon of the Wake, we have "abnihilisation" which we are told means the annihilation of something back to nothing. Joyce maintained that while he created Ulysses out of next to nothing, he was creating Finnegan's Wake out of nothing itself. Another word ( drawn from the very beginning of the Lexicon as I only downloaded a sample ) is "absintheminded". The combination of an alcoholic drink with the workings of the mind, conjuring up thoughts of absent mindedness. I'm beginning to understand just why Joyce was chuckling. But make up your own mind. 

Deconstructing James Joyce

We also have "accomplasses", in other words (!), young ladies plotting together. "Achdung" I shall leave to your imagination. I love "agleement", which suggests a group of people sharing a joke, all finding it funny.

Joseph Campbell has a book, "Mythic Worlds, Modern Words", which goes into the works of James Joyce in great depth. Campbell sees the works of Joyce as seeking to emulate that of Dante. Dante expressed in the Divine Comedy the essence of his own age, a time of "renaissance", change, where the  previously accepted teachings of the past were all in question. I'm undecided as to whether he pulled it all together or began to tear it all apart. Much the same as our very own times, when far more than that "old time religion" seems no longer to fit the bill.

The cosmology of Dante as envisaged by Botticelli

Campbell asserts that Ulysses was Joyce's Hell, of solid persons interacting and caught in the sway of opposites, of this as opposed to that. Finnegan's Wake was his purgatory. Things are becoming, fluid. Alas, Joyce never lived to present us with his heaven. Though thinking about it, it would surely have been his heaven, not ours? Nevertheless, having room I would hope for mercy and grace. 

Campbell  does say it would have been a short book, based upon the ocean. A relatively simple book. But we shall never know.

"A simple book of the ocean"

Related Quotes:-

"All mythologies are metamorphoses of form of a single great mythological system............ Joyce addresses the problem.........(of the) transition from a provincial limited experience of religion, race, and loyalties to a larger archetypal understanding."

 (Joseph Campbell, speaking of James Joyce)

"What do you do when you don't experience orthodox sentiments? Can you go on accepting the world that lives by them? He is already in exile." 

(Joseph Campbell, speaking of a character of Joyce, Stephen Dedalus, the literary alter ego of Joyce)

"I have never yet been able to conceive how anything can be known to truth by consecutive reasoning........" 

(From the letters of John Keats)

"A poets mind .......is constantly amalgamating disparate experience......the mind of the poet is constantly forming new wholes"

(T S Eliot) 

"All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light"

(James Joyce, from a letter written to Lady Gregory, 1902)

"Mystery of the unconscious? Bah! What about the mystery of consciousness?"

(James Joyce)