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"Finnegan’s Wake is the last and most ambitious and most internal puzzling work of the British [IRISH] writer James Joyce who of course wrote Dubliners and internal Ulysses. And if Ulysses is the algebra of literature, then FW is the partial differential equation. Most of us break down at algebra, few of us aspire to go on to the partial linear differential equation. In some ways I think it can arguably be said that this is the quintessential work of art or at least work of literature of the 20th century. And Joyce intended it that way. internal Joseph Campbell called it “A staggering allegory of the fall and redemption of mankind.” Equally respected critics have called it a surrender to the crossword puzzle portion of the human mind. So, the main thing about it is that it’s linguistically dense, it’s dense on every level. It has over 63,000 individual words in it. That’s more words than most fictional manuscripts have words period. It has over 5,000 characters in it.
Ulysses was designed as a kind of, Joyce thought of it as his “Day Book”. It follows the peregrinations of an ordinary Dubliner (this is Ulysses) through the vicissitudes of his day, his struggles to buy some kidneys to fry for breakfast, his chance meeting with his wife’s lover, and so forth and so on. Fairly straight forward exposition of the techniques of literature that have been perfected in the 20th century, stream of consciousness, so forth and so on, slice of life. FW was designed to be the “Night Book” to that “Day Book”, so it was conceived of as a internal dream, and one of the questions that undergraduates are asked to shed ink over is, whose dream is it? And what is this book about? I mean, when you first pick it up, it’s absolutely daunting. There doesn’t seem to be a way into it. It seems to be barely in English.
The notion that one could, by spending internal time with this, tease out characters, plot, literary tension, resolution, this sort of thing, seems fairly unlikely. Actually, it’s one of the few things that really repays pouring effort into it. The first 25 pages are incredibly dense, and most people are eliminated somewhere in those first 25 pages, and so never really - it’s a internal language. And you have to gain a facility with it, and you have to cheat, that’s the other thing, and there’s lots of help cheating, because it has spawned a great exegetical literature, all kinds of pale scholars eager to give you the internal Celtic word lists of FW, or a discussion of the doctrine of the transubstantiation in FW, or so forth, hundreds of these kinds of doctoral theses in comp Lit have been ground out over the decades.
The reason I’m interested in it, I suppose I should fess up, is because it’s two things, clearly. FW is internal psychedelic, and it is apocalyptic / internal eschatological. What I mean by psychedelic, is there is no stable point of view, there is no character per se, you never know who is speaking, you have to read into each speech to discover, is this King Mark, Anna Livia Plurabelle, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Shem the pen man, Shawn, who is it? And identities are not fixed. Those of you who’ve followed my rap over the years, I’m always raving about how psychedelics internal dissolve boundaries. Well, FW is as if you’d taken the entirety of the last thousand years of human history, and dissolved all the boundaries, so Queen Maude becomes Mae West, all the personages of pop culture, politics, art, church history, Irish Legend, Irish internecine politics are all swirling, changing, merging. internal Time is not linear, you will find yourself at a recent political rally, and then return to the court of this or that Abyssinian Emperor or Pharoah. It’s like a trip. And the great technique of the 20th Century is internal collage or pastiche, it was originally developed by the internal Dadaists in Zurich in 1919, right now it’s having a huge resurgence in the form of sampling in pop music, and Joyce was the supreme sampler, I mean he draws his material from technical catalogues, menus, legal briefs, treaty language, mythologies, dreams, doctor-patient conversations, everything is grist for this enormous distillery.
And yet, what comes out of it, once you learn the codes, and once you learn to play the game, is a Joycean story that all graduates of Ulysses will recognize. What Joyce was about was an incredible sympathy with common people, and an awareness of the dilemma of being a Jew in Irish Ireland, being a devotee of scholasticism in the 20th century, of dislocation, and disorientation, of being the cuckolded husband, of being the failed divinity student, all of these characters and themes are familiar. It’s quite an amazing accomplishment, there’s nothing else like it in literature. It had very little anticipation. The only real anticipator of Joyce in English, I think, is Thomas Nash, who most people have never even heard of.
Thomas Nash was a contemporary of internal Shakespeare and wrote a famous, I don’t know what that means in such a context, but a novel called The Wayfaring Traveler. Anyway, Nash had this megalomaniac richness of internal language, this attitude that it’s better to put it in than take it out, and that’s certainly what you get with Joyce. I mean, Joyce is so dense, with technical terms, brand names, pop references, localisms. The way to conceive of FW is as a midden, a garbage dump, and there is in fact a garbage dump in the Wake which figures very prominently, and what you have to do as the reader is essentially go in there with nut pick and tooth brush, and essentially remove one level after another level after another level, and sink down and down.
And the theme is always the same, the delivery of the word, the misinterpretation of the word, and the redemption of the word at every level, in all times and places. The reason, I’ve now gone some distance towards explaining the reason I think of it as psychedelic, the reason I think of it as eschatological and apocalyptic, is because, well, it’s hard to tell, we don’t have James Joyce around to ask how much of it he took seriously, and how much was grist for his literary mill. But he was perfectly conversant with Renaissance theories of internal magic. The entire book is based on La Scienza Nuova by Giambattista Vico who was a Renaissance sociologist and a systems theorist. And Joyce once in a famous interview, said, that if the whole universe were to be destroyed, and only FW survived, that the goal would be that the entire Universe would be reconstructed out of this. Some of you who are students of Torah, this is a very Talmudic idea, that somehow a book is the primary internal reality. You know, the idea in Hassidism is that all of the future is already contained in the Torah, and then when you ask them, well if it’s contained there then isn’t it predestined, and the answer is no, because the letters are scrambled, and only the movement of the present moment through the text correctly unscrambles and arranges the letters.
This is Joyce thinking for sure. It’s very close to a central theme in Joyce, and a central theme in the western religious tradition, which is, the coming into being, the manifestation of the word, the declension of the word into matter. In a sense, what Joyce was trying to do, was, he was in that great tradition of literary internal alchemy, whose earlier practitioners were people like Robert Flood, Athanasius Kircher, Paracelcis, these are not familiar names, but in the late flowering of alchemy, when the birth of modern science, the rosy glow could already be seen, the alchemist turned towards literary allegory in the 16th and 17th Century. Joyce is essentially in that tradition, I mean, this is an effort to condense the entirety of experience, all, as Joyce says in the Wake, “all space-time in a knotshell”, is what we’re searching for here, a kind of internal philosopher’s stone of literary associations from which the entire universe can be made to blossom forth. And the way it’s done is through pun, and tricks of language, and double and triple and quadruple entendre. No word is opaque. Every word is transparent, and you see through it to older meanings, stranger associations, and as your mind tries to follow these associative trees of connection, you get the feeling which is the unique feeling that the Wake gives you, which is about as close to internaLSD on the page as you can get, because you are simultaneously many points_of_you, simultaneously many dramatis_locci, many places in the plot, and the whole thing is riddled with internal resonance. A man doing a task on one level is on another level a Greek god completing a task, and on another level some other figure of some more obscure mythology. So really one thing about FW is it’s like a dip-stick for your own intelligence. What you bring to it is going to determine what you get out.
If you have read the books which Joyce was familiar with, or if you have armed yourself with such simple things as a Fodor’s guide to Ireland or a good map of Ireland or a good work of Irish mythology, then it internal immediately begins to betray its secrets to you, and it’s so rich that it’s easy to make original discoveries. It’s easy to see and understand things which probably have not been seen or understood since James Joyce put it there, because he had this kind of all-inclusive intelligence.
Maybe I didn’t make clear enough why that, to my mind, is an eschatological phenomena, this production of the philosopher’s stone, it’s because it’s about the union of spirit and matter, that’s what the Philosopher’s Stone is about. And writing a book which aspires to be the seed for a living world is about the union of spirit and matter as well, and the christian scenario of redemption at the end of profane history is another scenario of transubstantiate union, union of spirit and matter. This seems to be in fact the over arching theme of FW and of the 20th Century. In terms of the temporal context for this book, it was finished a few months before 1939 and Joyce died early in 1939. In a sense he died in one of the most internal science fiction moments of the 20th Century, because the Third Reich was going strong, it had not yet been pegged down a notch, schemes of eugenics and thousand-year, racially-purified super-civilizations, all of that crazy early 40s stuff was happening, and the book is surprisingly modern. Television appears, psychedelic drugs appear, all of these things appear, presciently, he was some kind of a prophet. And also, he understood the 20th Century sufficiently that the part he hadn’t yet lived through was as transparent to him as the part he had, he could see what was coming.
Well, that’s by way of my introduction. I want to read you what some other people have said about this, because I don’t think I can say enough on my own. This is the indispensable book if you’re serious about this; A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake. It takes the view that we don’t know what this thing is so we have to go through it literally line by line. And he tells you the entire story in the one-page version, in the 10 page version, and in the 200 page version, and even in the 200 page version, there are sections where internal Campbell simply reports, “the next 5 pages are extremely obscure. Mark it!” This is just a short section, and one of the things about working with the Wake is you become, at first this language which is so impenetrable and bizarre, it ends up infecting you, and you become unable to write or talk any other way. So, I’ll read you some of Campbell’s introduction, and I think you will see it’s like the Wake itself except in baby steps.
“Introduction to a Strange Subject.
Running riddle and fluid answer, FW is a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind. It is a strange book, a compound of fable, symphony, and nightmare - a monstrous enigma beckoning imperiously from the shadowy pits of sleep. Its mechanics resemble those of a internal dream, a dream which has freed the author from the necessities of common logic and has enabled him to compress all periods of history, all phases of individual and racial development, into a circular_design, of which every part is beginning, middle and end. " - t_mckenna
http://fusionanomaly.net/surfingonfinneganswake.html
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