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.







EXHIBIT A

(click to enlarge)

























































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.







Ted Gioia writes on literature, music and popular culture. His most recent

book is

The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire

.





