`A Cold Pudding of a Book'

A reader asks if I have read Finnegans Wake. I have – first, in increments, over decades, like most of its readers; then in toto, heavily armed with scholarship; of late, in increments again. I have no desire to reread all of Joyce’s final novel, one of literary history’s freakish cul-de-sacs, though I dip in occasionally for some of the set pieces, the Anna Livia Plurabelle section in particular.

Nabokov adored Ulysses but dismissed the Wake in his Lectures on Literature as “that petrified superpun” and “one of the greatest failures in literature.” In an interview with Alfred J. Appel Jr. he said:

“Ulysses towers over the rest of Joyce's writings, and in comparison to its noble originality and unique lucidity of thought and style the unfortunate Finnegans Wake is nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most aggravating to the insomniac I am. Moreover, I always detested regional literature full of quaint old-timers and imitated pronunciation. Finnegans Wake’s facade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity. I know I am going to be excommunicated for this pronouncement.”

That’s the heart of my Wake problem. I love it when Joyce breaks into song. At its best, the Wake is music – “heavenly intonations” -- but sadly one must wade through Vico, Jung and all the mythological nonsense. Recall that among the Wake’s early acolytes was Joseph Campbell, co-author of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, published five years after the novel.
When I finally read Joyce’s novel in its entirety in 1994, I used among other tools a heavily annotated copy of the Wake loaned to me by Harry Staley, professor emeritus of English at the state University of New York at Albany. It was a Viking hardcover edition held together with masking tape and rubber bands, interlarded with Harry’s supplemental annotations on note cards. The book it most resembled was my copy of Ulysses. I devoted about six months to the task of reading or decrypting the Wake, and it amounted to a guilt-driven chore interrupted by flashes of pleasure. It was unrelieved work for small return. I persisted because of a passing remark by Joseph Mitchell, the great nonfiction writer for The New Yorker and longtime member of the James Joyce Society in New York City. In his “Author’s Note” to Up in the Old Hotel, Mitchell describes his family’s storytelling tradition in North Carolina, and writes:

“I am an obsessed reader of Finnegans Wake – I must’ve read it at least a dozen times – and every time I read the Anna Livia Plurabelle section I hear the voices of my mother and my aunts as they walk among the graves in old Iona cemetery and it is getting dark.”

Go here to hear Joyce read from the “ALP” section, the part that begins:

“Well, you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you every telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing! My branches lofty are taking root. And my cold cher's gone ashley. Fieluhr? Filou! What age is at? It saon is late. 'Tis endless now senne eye or erewone last saw Waterhouse's clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh. When will they reassemble it? O, my back, my back, my bach! I'd want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Pingpong! There's the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew!”