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Why Finnegans Wake is better than Ulysses

In a nod to the uniquely challenging nature of the book that I’m sacrificing my youth to, I thought it might be worthwhile to offer some reasons to bother with it. And so I present the purposely divisive first in a series:

Why Read Finnegans Wake?
Part One: Because it’s better than Ulysses

Among the sort of people who care to form opinions about this sort of thing, it seems quite fashionable to call Ulysses the pinnacle of James Joyce’s achievement, and Finnegans Wake merely the unreadable folly on which he squandered the last 12 17 years of his productive life. This opinion was most convincingly voiced by Vladimir Nabokov, who (in this interview) named Ulysses the greatest novel of the 20th Century, but compared the Wake to “a persistent snore in the next room.” But let’s get this straight: Ulysses is a remarkable book, but one with a serious structural imbalance. It’s telling that Nabokov’s own lecture notes on Ulysses recommend skipping huge chunks of it that he simply didn’t like. As the book trundles along for the first eight chapters or so, the logic behind it seems pretty clear: to recount a single day in the lives of two people in obsessively detailed realism, following the train of their thoughts through stream-of-consciousness style. Round about chapter nine, however, the style seems to break off like a mad horse, leaving the characters in the dust. Thus we get episodes like chapter 11 (“Sirens”) in which grammar is replaced with a pseudo-musical system of motifs (I can’t wait to see how they deal with that on Ulysses “Seen”), or the following chapter (“Cyclops”), in which an anecdote by a pub landlord is unaccountably intercut with increasingly hyperbolic interruptions in a variety of incongruous styles. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it’s not the same book. In my opinion, Joyce simply grew tired of his original idea. Although it seems crazy now, he’d spent much of his life obsessed with Henrik Ibsen (anyone who’s read Exiles will, I hope, agree what a mistake that was), and I think he conceived Ulysses as an Ibsenian novel, in which the greatest extreme of realism is combined with an

equally obsessive system of semi-mystical symbolism. But eventually he simply outgrew Ibsen, and began to fully develop the style that he’s now best remembered for: that in which style itself takes centre-stage, so that, for example, a chapter about birth might start in Chaucerian English and develop through to present day slang, or one about miscommunication be written entirely in clichés. In Finnegans Wake, style oustrips not just the characters and the setting, but even the language itself. Style becomes fluid in a way that you will not experience in any other book, shifting from the complex syntax of classical history through fairy tales, to the pedantic diction of a science lecture, all of it suffused with poetry and irony in equal measure. More than that, it has the structural integrity that Ulysses lacks, a precise system of repetition and cyclical development that carries it from beginning to end. Far from being a self-indulgent imitation, Finnegans Wake feels in a lot of ways like the perfection of an idea for which Ulysses was merely the trial run. (Which is not to say that it isn’t self-indulgent.) So perhaps Finnegans Wake isn’t “better” than Ulysses. I suppose it really depends what you mean by “better”. It may not be the perfect book; it isn’t even my favourite book; but it is the most perfectly Joycean book, the pinnacle of his style, his vision and his temperament, and no one can claim to love Joyce without at least respecting it. No matter what Vladimir Nabokov might tell you.

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I’ve been putting this one off for a while. I’m still not entirely happy with it, but I just feel like I have to keep moving right now.

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The Passion of Earwicker

Yesterday was Shrove Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, and today the first day of Lent. As all good Christians know, this period marks the beginning of 40 days of fasting in memory of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, to prepare believers for the celebration of Easter. BUT, according to James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, the carnival of Shrove Tuesday and the period of fasting that follows have their roots in Pagan festivals to honour the god of vegetation. The corn god had to die every year in order to be reborn with the youth and vigour required to bring an end to winter for an agricultural people. These ceremonies in turn had their roots in even older rituals in which a priest-king, thought to have personal power over the elements, is killed, mourned for a period, and finally replaced by a younger candidate. Our Mr. Earwicker, the god of an urban people, in his present iteration is perhaps most simply summarised as a statesman whose character is assassinated so that his people may live. But like Jesus (and through Jesus), he has his origins in these ancient tales of blood sacrifice and natural revivification. So as I (painfully slowly) illuminate his “fishabed ghoatstory”, and as leaves and blossoms return to the trees, remember to give a thought to the Passion of Mr. Earwicker.

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Chapter Three

You may have noticed that the previous chapter had a fairly high level of narrative drive. Well, I hope you enjoyed it, because it’s over now. With chapter three we take a sudden plunge into extreme obscurity (“S’dense!”, as the first line says). I’ve been scratching my head over it for two weeks now, and I hope you won’t be too disappointed with the results.

Partially, at least, chapter three continues Mr. Earwicker’s story, but mostly it repeats and revises it. We begin by learnng of the final ends of many of the supporting characters from the previous chapter, all of them slightly altered, so that Hosty becomes “Osti-Fosti,” and the Cad with a pipe becomes “the snob of the dunhill.” After that comes the first (and, I think, the most confusing) of a number of retellings of Earwicker’s encounter with the Cad. An Irishman (Joyce himself, according to one source) exiled on the English coast tells the “fishabed ghoatstory” of HCE at the request of three schoolboys.

As I said, clarity is scarce, but the tale appears to concern the transformation of chapter two’s mundane encounter into the stuff of myth and religious ritual. A man is offered a cigar (“pluggy well suck that brown boyo, my son, and spend a whole half hour in Havana”), which appears to lead to his meeting “Master,” the “bester of redpublicans” at the Eagle Cock Hostel (the action having permanently moved from Dublin’s Phoenix Park to HCE’s pub). Their conversation is a comically mangled variation on the original, punctuated by the Irishman’s instruction to the schoolboys to follow his example (his own, or HCE’s, or both, I have no idea).

The story, we’re told, is never forgotten. Years later, one of the boys, now an old man, “rehearses” the story to a “namecousin” of an archdeacon. This cousin apparently repeats it to his relative, for we’re told that every time the archdeacon “reads the part”, his listeners, hearing his imitation of the performance given his cousin, feel themselves “timesported” back to the English coastline, watching the Irishman’s interpretation of the part originally played by Mr. Earwicker. All clear?

After a cock-and-bull story like that, it’s reassuring for the narrator to admit that he’s no less confused than we are. What are the facts? But the further we search for the truth, the further it appears to drift away. A crowd of “evidencegivers” is gathered “by legpoll” to offer their opinions, most of which are laughable, paradoxical or incomprehensible. Finally, a written record appears to be discovered, in the form of a police report recounting the second variation on the meeting with the Cad. A tall man, ”humping a suspicious parcel,” is held up by an “unknowable assailant” with whom he had fought over one of two women. But this evidence too is questioned in every particular: that the man was not tall, that he carried not a fender (a fireguard) but a bottle of stout, which he claimed to be attempting to open by banging it against a gate, although the sound he made was more like the end of days.

After a number of digressions, we finally return to Earwicker’s house, and to the third version of his encounter. Earwicker’s home is sealed by a gate both to lock others out and to lock him in. In the middle of the night, he is woken by a man issuing threats from beyond the gate if he (Earwicker) failed to give him drink. After delivering a torrent of abuse (which Earwicker greets with Christlike silence) the offender throws a few stones and finally retreats. And so Earwicker returns to bed. But is he sleeping? Is he imprisoned? Is he dead? As usual, nothing is clear, but the chapter ends with a prophecy that like King Arthur, “he skall wake from earthsleep.”

I hope this is helpful. I tried to strike a balance between sufficient explanation and overexplanation, but if anyone has questions, clarifications or corrections, I’d love to hear them!

CHAPTER THREE INDEX

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UPDATE: I really wasn’t happy with the effects I had on this one, so I just redid it a little bit.

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Concerning Puns

All right-thinking people hate puns. And our hearts all share the same image of the wretched punster, a characterless character afflicted by a surplus of education which has left him bereft of humour, save for the heaving chortles that belch forth from his unkempt beard as he repeats to some hapless, cornered victim – in the office Christmas party or the line for the post office – his discovery of two different words that happen to sound the same. James Joyce was, apparently, exactly this sort of person. According to his biographer, Richard Ellmann, the young Jim not only collected puns, but worse yet, he would reel them off at parties. And so it makes sense that some people might dismiss Finnegans Wake, as Martin Amis did in an article on the novel, as a book written in puns, a “reader-hostile, reader-nuking immolation.” But regardless of whatever regrettable behaviour might have marred Joyce’s personal life, the wordplay of Finnegans Wake is completely different from that of newspaper headlines and your pedantic uncle. It is a book that you cannot read without reorganising your approach to finding meaning.

In a normal sentence, ideas are connected in a logical structure to create a more or less coherent message. But in phrases like “the fall of a once wallstrait oldparr,” and “the length of the land lies under liquidation” (an eerily fitting description of Ireland today), the reader is adrift in a sea of ambiguous meanings. The banal abuts the divine, pleas of innocence turn into confessions and sermons into seductions. As communication goes, it’s perhaps a little inefficient. But once you get into it, it has a wonderfully disorienting effect on your brain. I could be wrong, of course. Possibly the greatest effect that reading Finnegans Wake has on the brain is that of forcing you to rationalise the time spent reading it...

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This style is not playing to my strengths, I’m afraid. Roll on chapter three!

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Chapter Two

f all the techniques that Joyce used to write Finnegans Wake, the most useful to the poor hapless reader must be that of repetition. Every story told through the course of the book essentially reiterates a single sequence of events. So the rise and fall of the great Finnegan which dominated chapter one was the primeval, mythic expression of a story that will recur again and again throughout the rest of the book. And so we come to chapter two, one of the most approachable sequences of the whole book, which begins the story of Finnegan’s replacement, alluded to at the end of the previous chapter. This is Mr. H.C. Earwicker, part-publican, part-politician, all-round eminent Dublin gentleman, popularly known as Here Comes Everybody (“constantly the same as and equal to himself and magnificently well worthy of and all such universalisation”). But no sooner has Earwicker’s tenure begun than does he begin to relive the sorry fate of his predecessor, assailed by enemies both real and imagined. Despite his good breeding and heroic reputation, Mr. Earwicker is plagued by rumours of a mysterious crime that supposedly took place in Dublin’s conveniently-named Phoenix Park, possibly involving two urinating young women, or three soldiers, or perhaps all five together.

It remains unclear exactly what this crime was, as well as whether HCE actually did it, although he certainly seems to feel guilty about something. When he is confronted in the park by a young “cad with a pipe” who asks him the time, he unaccountably takes the question as a threat, and launches into a confused defense of his character. This eccentric performance proves his downfall, however. Later that day, the cad tells his wife of his encounter. The next day, she tells her priest, who tells a professor at the races. Before long, the entire town is spreading the gossip. When it reaches the ears of a disreputable type of poetic tendencies named Hosty, he loses no time in penning and publishing a satirical song at Earwicker’s expense. Entitled “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly”, it’s an instant hit, it seems to spell the end for our hero. WHATEVER WILL HAPPEN NEXT?! I know, I know, it’s a nailbiter. But you’ll just have to wait. CHAPTER TWO INDEX

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Update

It’s been intolerably quiet around here of late, but not for no reason, I promise. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m planning something a little different for the next few chapters. Because chapters two to four tell a fairly linear and even rather intelligible story, I want to use a consistent style to match it. Unfortunately, that means I have to at least roughly plot out the next 73 pages before I begin, and I’ve had a few false starts. But on the plus side, once I’ve worked out what I’m doing, it should hopefully go a lot faster.

In other news, I have joined Twitter, although I’m still not really sure what it’s for. Anyone who cares to can find me as @invisibledot.

I’d also like to thank all the blogs that mentioned this project in the past few weeks! It’s really gratifying to see that people are interested in it!

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Page 628

I’ve really got ahead of myself here, but I was just too anal to leave that space blank.

First Line, version 2

Based on some comments over at Weaver of the Wind, I’ve been thinking about a new way of doing the first line. The tear effect was a bit of a rush job, but I’ll clean it up later. [Fixed it now, more or less.] The main problem apart from that is that it will, of course, look (and be) incomplete until page 628 is also done.

Thankyous

A few bloggers have been kind enough to link to this site recently, so I thought I should acknowledge and thank them all. It feels great to find out that people somewhere are seeing this stuff and getting something out of it. So thanks to:

Weaver of the Wind
Biblioklept
A Piece of Monologue
An und für sich
Daniel Silliman

In addition, I’d like to offer a warm “Dank u wel” to De Contrabas, “Merci bien” to riverrun.free.fr, and “Ευχαριστώ” to In Someone Else’s Dream. It’s weird enough for a native English speaker to be interested in Finnegans Wake. For a foreigner it’s close to miraculous. (That was my assumption, anyway. But I should say that I was reading FW on the bus here in Paris a few months ago, and a middle-aged woman sitting across from me asked how I was finding it, and admitted to giving up on the French translation many years ago. Would that ever happen in London?)

Because I’m a shameless ingrate, I completely neglected to acknowledge the kind words of Matt Kish, of the fantastic Moby Dick project, several months ago, as well as those of Jeffrey Meyer, who produces the most incredible collages I’ve ever seen.

–––

UPDATE:
Additional thanks to writinglounge.blogspot.com, Issa’s Untidy Hut and Ron Silliman!

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Chapter One

Tim Finnegan began life as the hero of “Finnegan's Wake”, a 19th-century song in the “stage Irish” tradition of American vaudeville, which was a lot like black minstrels, minus blackface, plus a whole lot of jokes about alcoholism. It’s not a particularly good song, and it probably would have flowed happily down the gutter of time were it not for James Joyce’s interest in it.

In the song, Finnegan is a hod carrier well-known for drinking on the job -- a habit which apparently leads to his premature demise by falling off a ladder. His family and friends gather for a wake which quickly descends into a drunken brawl (or as the song says, “shillelagh law was all the rage”, suggesting either that the Finnegan household kept numerous spare shillelaghs on hand, or even better, that the guests brought their shillelaghs for just such an eventuality). Bottles are thrown, one of which breaks over the casket, pouring whisky over the body of Finnegan and miraculously reviving him.

For all this song lacks in political correctness or musical quality, it was eerily perfect for Joyce's purposes. It's almost as if he wrote it himself. In chapter one of Finnegans Wake, this tale of a builder who falls to his death and is revived in the middle of his wake is retold on an epic scale. Or rather, an intermittently epic scale. Finnegan shifts ambiguously from being the middle-class drunk of the song to a culture-hero of mythological proportions. From hod carrier to Master Builder, he becomes the progenitor of civilisation itself. A god, whose death provokes nothing less than the coming of an age of darkness and the dawn of a new historical era. A man, his body is laid out for his wake. A colossus, his body becomes the topology of the land itself.


At the wake, his family, in one of many disturbing perversions of the story of Jesus, literally feeds on his body. When he wakes (not thanks to an anointment in whisky, as far as I can make out), they hold him down and convince him to stay dead. As this is a dream, the question of how much of him has already been eaten doesn’t arise. In any case, his relatives successfully subdue and bury him, in preparation for the arrival of his replacement, “a big rody ram lad” who will be “ultimendly respunchable for the hubbub caused in Edenborough.”

But his story, children, will have to wait for another time...

CHAPTER ONE INDEX

The Book In The Book – or, Why My Pictures Look Like Garbage

I’ve had no time for illustration this past month or so, but I have had plenty of time to think, so I thought I’d write a few posts about the book and the project and that kind of nonsense. The synopsis isn’t working for me anymore – every time I do a page it gets harder and harder to write it in a way that makes any coherent sense – so I think I’ll replace it with a page of my illiterate, ill-informed musings instead. Enjoy! First off, I thought it might be good to explain my decision to make all my illustrations look like they were soaked in tea for a primary school history project. There is an actual reason, which is all to do with the role that the book itself plays within the narrative of Finnegans Wake. That’s right, you don't really know a book is arty until you’ve found out how self-referential it is, and now I'm going to tell you. Just as the “characters” of Finnegans Wake shift among a huge cast of figures and settings, so the book itself appears in a variety of different guises. It is first discovered in a rubbish pile in chapter one, as the mysterious “Book of Doublends Jined”, an illuminated manuscript, part almanac, part religious text,

which tells the history of civilisation. Later it appears as the “Mamafesta” of the wife character, ALP, and as the scandalous novel of ALP's son, Shem the Penman. In what you might call the underlying narrative of the book, it is the letter, dictated by ALP to Shem, and delivered by Shem's brother, Shaun the Post, to their father, HCE, as a simultaneous love letter and testament to his innocence of the various unknown crimes for which he is brought to trial. Finally it is lost, and rediscovered in a rubbish pile, in chapter one. When I began this project, I wanted the look of the illustrations to take into account the book’s various incarnations -- to appear variously as an illuminated manuscript, as the work of an obsessive artist, and as scavenged discoveries of the city dump. So that’s why my pictures look like garbage. Well, that’s one reason, anyway.

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The story so far

I originally approached this project with a little to say about Finnegans Wake and a lot to learn about illustration. In a few months I’ll have been working on this project for a year, and although I still haven’t even finished chapter one, it feels like a good time to clarify some of my thoughts about the book (and, by extension, the project), and to reflect on what I’ve learnt through illustrating it. The main reason I began this project was that I desperately needed something to force me to draw, and hopefully to improve. I chose this book because it seemed like something I could bring a unique perspective to: although there are certainly many better illustrators than me, the number of them that have read Finnegans Wake is probably quite small. What I’ve managed so far is certainly far from perfect, but there are a few that I’m proud of, and I like to think that nearly all of them at least have the potential to be good, if I work on them for a while at some imagined time in the future. Most importantly, I’ve made a dedicated effort to minimise my use of filters, textures and other cheap tricks that disguise crappy work in much the same way that wood shavings cover up vomit at a funfair.

I’ve also started to home in a style that combines both what I think the project requires and what I actually enjoy doing. When I started, I told myself that jumping madly from style to style was the best way to serve the text — which isn’t entirely false, since chapter one leaps just as madly from one subject to another — but really, it was what I felt like doing at the time. But at this point, I’m quite keen to work on developing just one style as best I can. So that’s what I intend to do as soon as I start work on chapter two (I probably won’t wait until chapter one is completely finished). Since chapters two to four follow basically the same story in more or less the same setting, I can convince myself again that a decision based on caprice is really the best way to honour the book. Well, that's probably enough for now — I’ll save my thoughts about the book for another post. That about sums up how I feel about the way things are going, but I’d love to get some feedback to see what other people think!

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As usual, you can tell it’s a little rushed, but I’m so behind!

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Update: This is obviously not page 25 at all. It’s page 24, and I’m an idiot.

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Page Eight

Much as I love Henry Darger, I'm getting really tired of tracing.

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A quick one to get me back into it. This is a Moby Dick-inspired illustration for a Moby Dick-inspired line, in honour of this fantastic project by Matt Kish (whose surname, incidentally, would have pleased Joyce no end). (And whose birthday it apparently is today. Happy birthday, Matt!)

Back to work

Reunited with dogeared copy of Finnegans Wake: check
Laptop back from Applestore: check
Holiday almost over: check
Sick to death of other distractions/projects: check

I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.