'A Book You Know You Don’t Understand'

Some thirty years ago, at his request, I met with an author in upstate New York who wanted me to write a feature story for my newspaper about him and the small-press book he had written. Frank had been lobbying me for weeks by telephone. He was middle-aged but carried himself like a graduate student in English. He was smart, cocky, sure of his gifts and fancied himself an avant-gardiste. I made no promises but agreed to meet him and hear his pitch. 

I had already read his little book. It was obvious he was aping Finnegans Wake, though his text  was mostly monolingual. The prose was heavy on alliteration, puns and “Jabberwocky”-like nonsense words. Some passages were silly, others embarrassing, as when adults resort to baby-talk. Frank called it a novel though the narrative line was thin or non-existent. When I brought up his obvious debt to Joyce’s final novel, he turned coy. For multiple reasons, all journalistically valid, I declined to write a story and never heard from him again.      

 

Lots of bright, bookish, word-drunk young people have been drawn to Finnegans Wake. I was while in high school. It had the same appeal as the “mathematical games” Martin Gardner published for decades in Scientific American. A certain sort of adolescent mind enjoys cracking codes and solving puzzles – harmless recreations that can't be turned readily into literature. Like so much “experimental” or avant-garde writing, the Wake attracts readers who relish difficult or impossible texts, unlike the hoi polloi who seek the philistine pleasures of storytelling and revelations of character. Nabokov called it “nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book.”

 

I first read Finnegans Wake 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 novel, one of literary history’s freakish cul-de-sacs, though I dip in occasionally for some of the set pieces such as the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section, with its echoes of Livia Veneziani Svevo, Italo Svevo’s wife.

 

When I finally read the Wake in its entirety, in 1994, I used a heavily annotated copy of the novel loaned to me by the late Harry Staley, then professor emeritus of English at the state University of New York at Albany. It was a hardcover edition held together with tape and rubber bands, swollen with Harry’s annotations on note cards. It looked even more beaten-up than my copy of Ulysses. I devoted six months, on and off, to the task of reading or decrypting the novel. It amounted to a guilt-driven chore interrupted by flashes of pleasure. It was unrelieved work for a modest return.

 

In 1975, Howard Nemerov published “Thoughts on First Passing the Hundredth Page of Finnegans Wake” in the Autumn 1975 issue of The American Scholar. Nemerov’s essay is neither dismissal nor endorsement. It’s a balanced reading: “As far as I have got in this book, I’ve had every feeling in the book: fascination and despair, pleasure, charm, bitter resentment, resistance to reading one inch farther; great  admiration, terrible boredom, simple fury at frustration, childish delight at resolving this or that small trouble, and so on.”

 

That jibes with my experience. Nemerov tells us he is “amazed” at Joyce’s accomplishment. I agree, but the Irishman got carried away by his own genius. My reaction resembles the way I feel as an adult when a magician flawlessly performs a trick that baffles me – a small burst of wonder tempered by knowing there’s an explanation even I might understand. Here’s how Nemerov closes his essay:

 

“Still, I shall go on, though maybe only a little at a time. What a marvelous book! I even want to find out what happens over again next. And there’s a wondrous helpful thing about reading a book you know you don’t understand; it may teach you something about all those other books you thought you did.”