Finnegans Wake: My Thoughts

So,

I had a difficult time deciding what I was going to say about Finnegans Wake, because like John Bishop says,

"for while it may well be one of the hardest books in the world actually to sit down and read, it is one of the easiest books in the world to generalize about." (xiv)

I agree with Bishop. Saying anything definitively about the Wake is difficult, if not impossible--especially if you're a sophomore studying English Literature, and have only begun to lick the gargantuan salt block that is the world of literature, music, and culture.

But, here's what I think. I think Finnegans Wake is everything. But it is also nothing. It is beginnings, ends, monotone, songs, love, tears, death, rivers, food, shit, sex, pineapples, karate, soccer, lists, and, as Hamlet so aptly put it, "Words, words, words."

The book itself is a river of recurring themes, authors, and characters: Romulus, Remus, Brutus, Cassius, Sherlock Holmes, Giambattista Vico, Shakespeare, Adam, Eve, Cain, God, the eternal return--basically, anyone who's anyone in the world makes an appearance at some point.

Finnegans Wake can be a fun parlor-game for English-majors, taking an hour or two a week bent over a paragraph, attempting to decipher the meaning hidden in the words. But it is much more than that.

To understand the novel is a lifelong process, what it says now to a 20-year-old will change drastically when that 20-year-old becomes 40, and then 60. The reader falls into Joyce's well placed trap, the trap of eternal recurrence, the fact that we never realize what something is or where it is, until we return to it again and again, and as Eliot put, "know the place for the first time". 

But it is unfortunate that so many run from this text, fleeing from its enticing, jumbled print. Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange speaks very well on this in his novel Rejoyce:

"Difficult? Oh yes, difficult. But a certain difficulty is the small price we must pay for excitement, richness, originality. And we must learn to smile rather than frown: this is the world of 'Jabberwocky'. But the dream is not Alice's. We are dreaming a mature dream, remembering the past of mankind and the primal guilt that history hides but reveals. Yet the dream is a joke, as life itself may be." (250)

Because there is incredible depth in this novel! Because it seeks an answer, through crazed questioning--why do we continue to tell the same stories--why do we perpetuate the violence, the guilt? Is there another story? Or is this the only one we know? Joyce spent 17 years of his life asking this question, and it is up to us to unravel it.

If we can do this, if we take the time to have fun (I believe this to be the ultimate goal, not that high-handed stuff above), laugh, cry--we will be rewarded with the eternal vision:

"And the eternal vision is made out of muddy water, old saws, half remembered music hall songs, gossip, and the stain on a pair of underpants." (Burgess 279)

Reap the rewards people. Reap the rewards.