Thoughts about Finnegans Wake
Posted: Fri Jul 16, 2021 8:33 am
The first chapter, which I read last night, seemed to be about Finnegan's death and the subsequent wake in which copious quantities of booze were consumed, and the effects of which came out in the narrative.
It was difficult to read at first (Joyce's attempt to shake off the uncommitted reader?), but then seemed to fall into a rhythm that was strangely relaxing and at times seemed to be 'metered' almost in the way of poetry rather than prose. I had read a certain amount of background commentary on the book rather than just 'diving in' (as it were), but in truth this did not seem to be very helpful. Not much of it stayed with me as I entered the work, and I had pretty much decided to just get in there and see what all of the fuss was about. This seems to me to have been a useful approach, and my familiarity with the way that Cornish people speak (not the same, but analogous in the way they elide words together and use difficult constructions of words than is seen in English proper) seemed to help me in making sense of what on the surface might seem like unintelligible prose. Perhaps (and I readily concede this as a possibility) I was (or more correctly my brain was) attempting to introduce sense where there either was none, or where Joyce intended some completely different meaning - but never the less it seemed to be working for while no obvious 'story' was emerging from it, there did seem to be a kind of narrative running through it that I was able to glimpse, chimera like, behind the prose.
The puns and plays on words, some more obvious than others, were fun to grasp when you spotted them and I can see why commentators have said that Joyce was deliberately writing for a more committed type of reader - one that was prepared to put in the work of teasing out the meaning by hours of study and contemplation. I can fully see how this riddle of a book could become an obsession, almost a lifetime's work in its analysis, and while I don't see myself becoming one of those Wake students who pour over every word and sentence {Joyce himself said that there wasn't a single syllable in the book that was superfluous), I'm certainly going to go back for Round 2, and am very much looking forward to doing so.
It was difficult to read at first (Joyce's attempt to shake off the uncommitted reader?), but then seemed to fall into a rhythm that was strangely relaxing and at times seemed to be 'metered' almost in the way of poetry rather than prose. I had read a certain amount of background commentary on the book rather than just 'diving in' (as it were), but in truth this did not seem to be very helpful. Not much of it stayed with me as I entered the work, and I had pretty much decided to just get in there and see what all of the fuss was about. This seems to me to have been a useful approach, and my familiarity with the way that Cornish people speak (not the same, but analogous in the way they elide words together and use difficult constructions of words than is seen in English proper) seemed to help me in making sense of what on the surface might seem like unintelligible prose. Perhaps (and I readily concede this as a possibility) I was (or more correctly my brain was) attempting to introduce sense where there either was none, or where Joyce intended some completely different meaning - but never the less it seemed to be working for while no obvious 'story' was emerging from it, there did seem to be a kind of narrative running through it that I was able to glimpse, chimera like, behind the prose.
The puns and plays on words, some more obvious than others, were fun to grasp when you spotted them and I can see why commentators have said that Joyce was deliberately writing for a more committed type of reader - one that was prepared to put in the work of teasing out the meaning by hours of study and contemplation. I can fully see how this riddle of a book could become an obsession, almost a lifetime's work in its analysis, and while I don't see myself becoming one of those Wake students who pour over every word and sentence {Joyce himself said that there wasn't a single syllable in the book that was superfluous), I'm certainly going to go back for Round 2, and am very much looking forward to doing so.