James Joyce And The Hardest Book To Read

There’s an old joke about a dog who wishes to place a classified ad in a newspaper. On relaying his ad to the newspaper’s representative, the dog woofs nine times. The representative tells the dog that ads are charged for every ten words, and that he can throw in another “woof” for free. “But then it wouldn’t make sense,” replies the dog.

This is similar to the experience many of us have with James Joyce’s 1939 masterwork, Finnegans Wake. The novel is a seemingly incomprehensible jumble of sentences and paragraphs, as syntax and semiotics are forged into new and confounding shapes, and literary form and function are thrown out the window. And yet each word is exactly where it needs to be – each mind-bending motif precisely reflects the intent of its author. The meaning at its core might be lost on us, but it’s there, buried within that rich jamboree of language.

Many have tried to tackle Finnegans Wake head-on. Most have failed, but a few have succeeded. Here are a few of those successful experiences.

Understanding Finnegans Wake

In 1924, James Joyce sat down to write the follow-up to his masterpiece Ulysses. An enormous critical hit, Ulysses has become part of literary legend, simultaneously obtuse and confounding, and lyrically beautiful. But his next book was going to dial all of this up by several notches.

The process was a slow one. The finished work, Finnegans Wake, would not be completed until 1939 – 17 years after writing began, and less than two years before the author’s death. Despite his fame, Joyce’s final work went largely unappreciated at the time, as critics struggled to comprehend the author’s vision. “You have turned your back on common men!” said H.G. Wells.

But perhaps this is missing the point. Perhaps this whole section is missing the point – there is no “understanding” of Finnegans Wake. Instead, there is only a relationship formed with the language, and with the literary inventiveness contained within. This language, when we look at it upon the page, is quite obviously English, but it is an English the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

Taking the Author’s Advice

After taking 17 years to write Finnegans Wake, Joyce famously suggested that a reader should also take 17 years to get through it. This is precisely what happened when Australian novelist Gabrielle Carey set out to tackle the work.

In 2004, Gabrielle sat down with her reading group to begin Finnegans Wake, and in 2021, they finished it. Over this time, the core membership of the group remained largely unchanged but experienced the full gamut of life events over the course of their reading together.

As Gabrielle said: “an almost divorce, an actual divorce, various depressive episodes, three births, two cancer diagnoses, and one death,” all took place before the group had finished the book.

After reaching the end of the novel, Gabrielle would describe the effort as “physical… and oddly gymnastic,” but stated that she always “felt electrified, switched on and alive to language in a new way – grateful to this magical passport into another linguistic universe.”

Devoting a Quarter Century and Change

Seventeen years is actually pretty good going. Other successful attempts have taken far longer. The most recent completion of Finnegan’s Wake involves a group of Californian readers. Led by experimental filmmaker Gerry Fialka, this reading group took over ten years longer than Gabrielle Carey.

The group, who earned the title The California Finnegan’s Wake Reading Group, started their own journey with Finnegans Wake in 1995. At this point, the group of between 10 and 30 people met monthly at the local library. They set out with optimism, and originally read two pages a month. But soon, this slowed to only one page per discussion. At that pace, the group anticipated that the 628-page monstrosity of a text would take them 28 years. And, in 2023, they finally reached its end.

The Californian group took longer to read Finnegan’s Wake than James Joyce spent writing it, which the famed author would be very pleased about, having famously said “the demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his entire life to reading my works.”

A lot of the members in Fialka’s group have done pretty much this. Fialka himself was in his 40s when he started the group, and now, having just finished, is 70.

Other members of the group, like Bruce Woodside, have come and gone. Woodside joined the reading group in the 1990s, and then left again, only to return decades later after retiring. He had, in that time, joined other Finnegan’s Wake reading groups, and still hadn’t reached a point where he understood, or had finished the text.

Another member of the group, Peter Quadrino, joined in the early 2000s. He drove from San Diego to California for the reading group, explaining that ‘if you’re really interested in Finnegan’s Wake, it’s kind of hard to find people who will talk about it with you’. Quadrino himself has dedicated so much of his time to the text that when he moved to Texas, simply too far to commute, he started his own Finnegan’s Wake group!

On reaching his goal, Gerry Fialka did not have a spiritual awakening, or anything so profound. “I don’t want to lie, it wasn’t like I saw God,” he said. “It wasn’t a big deal.” This is appropriate, as the book famously finishes mid-sentence, and loops back around to page one, which begins in the same way – mid-sentence. If this sounds like a spoiler, trust me – it’s not. Letting this kind of information slip about Finnegans Wake doesn’t even begin to make the tiniest of scratches upon its surface.

The Podcast Companion

Others have attempted to offer their own assistance to those seeking to get to grips with the work. The LitHub project Finnegan and Friends is a series of podcasts and articles designed to help other readers do exactly that.

The podcast’s creators remind readers that tackling Finnegans Wake does not involve taking some sort of lengthy holiday from reality or losing precious years in a vain attempt to divine some kind of plot or reason from the text. Instead, it’s an exploration of an “infinite complexity [that] comes from attention to our most simple, elemental experiences (of dreams, of water, of local and familiar language).” In other words, it’s about the “wonders of the basic stuff of life.”

Decoding the Mystery, or Not…

Full disclosure is required here. I have had my own dalliances with Finnegans Wake, and they did not end well. The Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man gave me a glimpse into the magic and majesty of Joyce’s prose, offering just enough of a concrete understanding of plot and imagery with which to situate myself within his work.

Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, left me bemused. Not because it’s a bad book – it most certainly is not, it’s a work of literary abstract art that aligns with its creator’s philosophical and linguistic vision – but because I was simply not equipped to take that journey at that time of my life.

Maybe it’s time to muster up the courage once more. Maybe it’s time for me to reach out to one of the 50+ Finnegan’s Wake groups like Gerry Fialka’s. Who knows, maybe it really is time to try again. Or maybe it’s time to give up any idea of “decoding the mystery”, and just appreciate the author’s rich explorations of the possibilities of language.

Definitive understandings are overrated, anyway. That’s just not how life, and literature, work. But that won’t stop people from trying — just ask the Zurich group, who have read the text three times in nearly 40 years!