by Ted Gioia

1.

First, don’t be afraid of the big bad Wake. Reading it is an
adventure, not a punishment. Consider it a rite of passage,
or as the literary equivalent of one of those extreme sports
they put on ESPN2 after midnight. It isn’t supposed to be easy,
but with the right frame of mind, it can be enjoyed.  Even if you
fail to complete the course, you can walk away proud and with
something to show from the experience—if only a Joycean
evocation of a thunderclap (see below).  

2.

Did I say it wouldn’t be easy?

My favorite Finnegans Wake anecdote: On Good Friday in
the year 1938, the writer Jacques Mercanton paid a call on
his friend James Joyce. He found the author deep in
conference with lit scholar Stuart Gilbert—Joyce was
distrubed that a passage in Finnegans Wake was “still not
obscure enough.” The solution:  Joyce decided to add
some words from the language of the Samoyedic peoples
of Siberia.

Gilbert concurred, but noted it was a “dog of a tongue”—
a punning reference to the Samoyed breed of canine.
Joyce, never to be outdone with a pun, agreed that the
language was indeed a “bitch.”

3.

The good news is that there are still a few thousand native
speakers of Samoyed in the world.  Perhaps you will be
sitting next to one when you get to that part of the book.  

4.

Okay, it won’t be easy. But a smart explorer always comes
with a toolkit. Look in the sidebar (or click here) to find out
how I equipped myself for my exploration of Finnegans Wake.
Every adventurer needs to decide how much baggage to
bring along.  If you want to travel light, I would simply pack
a copy of William York Tindall’s guide to Finnegans Wake.  
It will fit in a pocket and won’t slow you down.  I needed
more tools, and so came with a lot more equipment.  
How adventurous are you?  How much support do you need?
Only you can decide.

5.

The single best piece of advice for reading Finnegans Wake:
read it aloud.  A friend gave me this tip before I started, and I
stuck with it for the entire course of the book. I don’t usually
read prose aloud, and there’s only one other long book that I’ve
read aloud from front to back (with the exception of those Harry
Potter and Narnia books I read to my children when they were
growing up), namely the King James version of the Bible.   
Reading Finnegans Wake aloud not only brings out the
visceral flow of the work, but it also unlocks many hidden
meanings. Joyce often disguises his puns and allusions
with peculiar spellings and verbal distortions.  Sometimes
these are hidden on the printed page, but are made obvious
when spoken.

6.

Definitely listen to Joyce reading a section from Finnegans
Wake.  You can find it on YouTube (here’s the link).

7.

Also consider going for group therapy.  No, not that kind of
group therapy, but to one of the many Wake cohorts where
you can  join other adventurers in reading and discussing
the book. Here’s a link to the online directory of Finnegans
Wake reading groups    As you can see, you will find daring
literary explorers everywhere from Adelaide (Australia) to
Zurich (Switzerland).

8.

There are two ways of approaching this book. You can
take an analytical approach, and focus your energy on
unlocking the many hidden meanings. Or you can view
Finnegans Wake as a kind of music, and get carried
away on the flow of the words.  As you can hear in
Joyce’s recorded reading, he emphasizes the music,
delivering the text in a sing-song chant.

Both of these approaches can be pushed too far.  If you
get obsessed with unlocking the meaning of the text, you
will never finish the book, because even the most
determined Joyceans haven’t come close to exhausting
the layers of hidden signification in this book. On the
other hand, if you just treat Finnegans Wake as a melody
or chant, you will miss the ingenuity and intelligence that
Joyce packed into his prose.  

“There are no nonsense syllables in Joyce!” Joseph
Campbell assures us.  I’m not sure I would go quite so far.
James Joyce would have been the last author to dismiss
nonsense.  Even Campbell, although he made his best effort
with his book A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake to discern
Joyce’s intentions, frequently must have despaired over
the many opaque passages. But after 75 years of textual
scrutiny, we can confidently assert that Joyce inserted levels
of signification in this book that no one was likely to
comprehend in his own lifetime. And we can safely disregard
the verdict of Joyce’s friend-and-adversary Oliver Gogarty,
who declared that his former roommate had perpetrated “a
gigantic hoax…one of the most enormous leg-pulls in history.”
Joyce labored over this text for seventeen years, and he
put far more into Finnegans Wake than anyone has yet
extracted from it.  He had confidence that  this novel would
be studied by later scholars, and deliberately put in
ingredients that would challenge and delight them.

9.

James Joyce admitted as much.  He claimed that his book
would “keep the critics busy for three hundred years.”  Okay,
we’ve been at it for 75 years—so we are 25% of the way
through the project.  

Unfortunately our progress is slowing down. And I suspect
that Joyce put a few mysteries in the book that no one will
ever notice, let alone solve, even with infinite time and
Google’s best search algorithms.

10.

My advice is to take a balanced approach. Do some
research before tackling each chapter in Finnegans Wake.  
And then try to make the actual reading of the chapter into a
kind of musical performance.  

11.

Also beware of searching too hard for hidden meanings in
this text. Some people will tell you that Joyce anticipated
everything from television to atomic power in this novel.  
If you scrutinize it too much, you will be convinced that
Joyce predicted Twitter (see page 9, line 16 of Finnegans
Wake), as well as Google (page 620, line 22), email (page
575, line 16) and  friends with benefits (page  360, line 16).  
Although, in the latter instance, be aware that Joyce has
trouble distinguishing between secret hookups and the
Egyptian deity Sekhet Hetep.  

12.

What happens when people scrutinize this text too closely?  
Check out this collection of possible symbols and allusions
in the first sentence of the novel. As you will see, scholars
have seized on dozens of “clues” in this sentence. Clearly
Joyce intended many, perhaps most of these, but you will
also get a sense of how you can overreach in finding patterns
and meanings.

13.

And here’s the Joycean thunderclap I promised above. There
are ten of these thunderings in Finnegans Wake, but this is the
salacious one, suitable for entertaining bohemian and louche
party guests:

Bladyughfoulmoecklenburgwhurawhorascortastrumpapornanen-
nykocksapastippatappatupperstrippuckputtanach.


14.

Fortunately Joyce built various ‘failsafe’ mechanisms into
his text. So if you miss something the first time around, you
will get another chance to grapple with it later.   

For example, if you don’t understand the symbolism of
Wellington and his monument in chapter one, you will get  
another chance at the end of the book—and along the way,
you will find references to Wellinghof, Wellingthund,
Wellingtonia, wellingtonorseher, Wei-Ling-Taou,
wheywingingly, Whiddington, etc. etc.  Sooner or later,
you will figure it out.  If you didn’t grok the story of Buckley
and the Russian general at its first telling, you might latch
on to it the second, third, fourth or fifth time it enters the text.  
If you struggle with the conversation between Mutt and Jute
in chapter one, it will get re-echoed in later dialogues
between Butt and Taff and Muta and Juva.  And even if
you still don’t comprehend their conversation at that point,
you can take some comfort in knowing that they didn’t either
—see, among other things, Joyce is playing on the idea of
a dialogue between the deaf and the mute. If you can’t figure
out the details of the hero’s scandalous indiscretion in a
public park the first time around, it will get told and retold
many times in the pages ahead.  If you miss a pun, there
are still thousands more waiting for you before Finnegans
Wake comes to an end.  

In fact, the book doesn’t come to an end.  It just connects
back to the beginning. So the truest statement once can
make about this novel is: Whether you understand it or not,
it will come back again. To some extent, that’s the ‘meaning’
of the book.  

15.

Joyce’s zeal for repetition and variation provide the key to
unlocking the more difficult passages in Finnegans Wake.  
When lost in one of these apparently impenetrable sections
of the novel, look for the recurring signposts.  When Joyce
wants to call your attention to something, he doesn’t just
mention it once, but will usually insert several telltale words,
puns or phrases. These will usually be clustered together in
close proximity, and juxtaposed with other recurring symbols.  
With each repetition in the book, these markers take on
deeper meaning and new associations. Once you under-
stand their bearing on the passage in question, you will notice
other resonances that you missed at first.  Puns and wordplay
will become obvious.  The meaning of previously obscure
phrases will become clear.  

16.  

When all else fails, try reading the word backwards.  

Doog kcul!

17.

John Bishop, one of the more skilled explorers in the
deeper caverns of Finnegans Wake, offers similar advice.  
Don’t read this novel “linearly and literally,” he suggests.  
Instead, “we interpret it as we might interpret a dream, by
eliciting from the absurd murk a network of overlapping
and associatively interpenetrating structures.”

Joseph Campbell breaks down this process into three
parts: “(1) discovering the key word or words, (2) defining
one or more of them, so that the drift of Joyce’s thought
becomes evident, (3) brooding awhile over a paragraph,
to let the associations running out from the key centers
gradually animate the rest of the passage.”

Brooding is the most important part….

18.

Yet, even when you have finished your adventure, there will
still be terrain left unexplored. There is always a deeper
cavern still hidden in darkness. If you can decipher the
easier passages, you can go for harder ones.  And if you
master those, you will find still more formidable passages
awaiting your interpretation.  Eventually you might even be
able to answer Joyce’s question when he asks:

“Evilling chimbes is smutsick rivulverblott but thee hard
casted thereass pigstenes upann Congan’s shootsmen
in Schot- tenhof, ekeascent?”  (Finnegans Wake, page 538).

Then again, when it comes to Finnegans Wake, many
questions are best left unanswered.  Some, in fact, are
a real bitch.