reading Finnegans Wake
It's the sort of book you might have on your shelf for thirty years but never read it through. A book you look at sometimes when reflecting on what it might be to be a great writer. It becomes a kind of touchstone for you. You're a bit in awe of the book. On the back of it this is written:
The last great work of the twentieth century's most influential writer.
From time to time you take down the book and begin to read ..
riverrun, past Eve and Adams, ..
.. and skim — the easy bits ..
and we list, as she bibs us, by the waters of babalong.
*
Alone a long at last I took it on. All 628 pages —twenty or so a day I paced myself, for I quickly discovered it was the way to read a book like this .. swiftly.
Or should I say slowly. At my own unhurried pace, savoring the words as they passed beneath my eyes, taking in whatever meaning I could and not pausing to figure it out. Concentrating on the illusive music of it. Aye, music. (I have to say something to bring you in.)
No hanging about to decipher meanings. Just take the twenty percent and go on with that. Then it becomes quite the reading experience. Even if you haven't the foggiest notion of what's happening, you can't miss the sense of something or other going on behind the words. Whenever you get lost in the meaning - and you will - there is always the music, and you can often beat your finger on the table listening to it.
He sprit on his phiz (baccon!). He salt to their his (pudden!). [p363]
Oh yes, and also the syntax and structure. Coming in and out of focus, sometimes quite clear, more often impossibly cryptic, and here you are in a flow of lyrical rhetoric punctuated by short exclamations, argot, phrases and ideas seemingly unrelated even to what has preceded it in the same sentence, and which takes the prose in all its many directions at once, and you're flailing about in the foamy rapids and you're thinking, ah god, all is lost, but then you're brought out into some clear water, as though to show it can still be done like in the first ten years after the turn with Dedalus and bloody Bloom, to this:
But, boy, you did your strong nine furlong mile in slick and slapstick record time and a farfetched deed it was in troth, champion docile, with your high bouncing gait of going and your feat of passage will be contested with you and through you, for centuries to come. The phaynix rose a sun before Erebia sank his smother! Shoot up on that, bright Bennu bird! Va faotre! Eftsoon so too will our own sphoenix spark spirt his spyre and sunward stride the rampante flambe. Ay, already the sombrer opacities of the gloom are sphanished! Brave footsore Haun! Work your progress! Hold to! Now! Win out, ye divil ye! The silent cock shall crow at last. The west shall shake the east awake. Walk while ye have the night for morn, lightbreakfastbringer, morroweth whereon every past shall full fost sleep. Amain.
It's not a linear structure. It's a vertical one. All ideas compacted into the one space, ignoring altogether the constraints of the page. In its own way, like a painting. A point which allows me to digress.
FW is like a draft of another version of FW yet to be written. Joyce was notorious for his drafts. Forever tinkering. Reminds me of another artist of his generation known for that approach.
Here's Picasso:
For me each painting is a study. I say to myself: one day I am going to finish it, turn it into a finished thing.But as soon as I start finishing it, it becomes another painting and I think I am going to start it all over again. And it is always something else in the end. If I touch it, I turn it into a new painting.[1]
Writing is a little known facet of Picasso’s output. Androula Michael has done a fascinating exposition of Picasso’s writing method. [2] Inside Picassso’s Writing Laboratory presents the eighteen drafts or “states” of a poem Picasso wrote between November and December 1935. The method Picasso used was one of endless insertion of words and phrases into a small starting text, which is expanded in due course in a “rhizomatic” fashion.
In the first state, Picasso begins with this phrase:
langue de feu évente sa face dans la flûte la coupe
By the 13th state this has been expanded to:
langue qui fait son lit peu lui importe la rosée qui frappe la jument faisant son riz au poulet dans la poêle et organise dans l’amour la nuit avec ses gants de rire autour de la ligne de feu plus offensée qu’elle ne paraît et si pâle de voir comme jambon ne sent et fromage frémit et l’oiseau qui chante et tord le rideau qui évente sa figure et la coupe dans la neige qui cuit dans ses rubans de melons de cabri de toutes les couleurs dans la flûte la coupe
By the eighteenth draft, the poem has grown to some 3550 words, basically without punctuation. The technique of revision is remarkably similar to that which Joyce employed in the draft revisions of Finnegans Wake [3] It shows Picasso having a graphical/structural attitude to written text which is not unsimilar to that of many major literary experimenters of his century.
As with Picasso, so with Joyce. Meaning may be obscure or hidden, but it's never missing. Quite the opposite, its a surfeit of meaning. It's meaning compacted, fused, onto a page, a line, a word itself. Creating this concrete abstraction in which meaning can only be intuited out of each page, each line, each word - a meaning which shifts continually and therefore has existence not in a sequential sense as plot, character, theme, but as something existing in the instant of time that the eye perceives the word, the line, the page. A meaning which can not be pinned down for long because it changes beneath the eye. Such is this chimera, this composition of allusion and cross references and triple meanings taken to extreme.
That is to say: infinite meaning (or jest). Like the meaning, say, squeezed out of Vollmann's sequence of instants:
'... an ellipsis between words, a quartet of periods, thus: .... —but which, if through close reading we magnify them into spheres, prove to contain in each case a huddle of twenty-four grey subterranean hours like orphaned mice: and in the flesh of every hour a swarm of useless moments like ants whose queen has perished; and within each moment an uncountable multitude of instants resembling starpointed syllables shaken out of words ...' [Europe Central]
Here then is the difficulty. Not so much difficulty as denseness. In a language all its own. Unique. Written without concession. Not just the antithesis of anything you'd find at any airport bookshop. Way, way beyond that. The hardest hard-core book out there. And that is one of its abiding fascinations. To appreciate a book like FW is to understand that it inhabits some rarified stratosphere above the vast mountain of other books, a place in which no other such book exists. It's that exclusive. In fact, while I've often seen Ulysses in the "classics" shelf of many a bookshop, finding a copy of FW is so rare that I sometimes wonder if its still in print.
Which brings me back to where I started. You have to respect a book which is so uncompromising. It's not just that it's so original. (Which it is. Joyce never repeated himself, every one of his books is radically different from its predecessor.) It's because it's an exemplar of that rare work of art seemingly unconcerned with the real world and the billions who inhabit it. A work of art outside of time and of history. A work of art in a vacuum. That's how uncompromising it is (no matter its motivation, which may well have derived from the normal ego and vanity of its author — who can say).
References:
[1] to Alexander Liberman, cited in Inside Picassso’s Writing Laboratory by Androula Michael
[2] -At the Picasso Official Web Site: http://www.picasso.fr/anglais/
[3] see online at http://www.robotwisdom.com /jaj/fwake/ index.html.