Finnegans Wake (1939) is James Joyce’s last novel and the one most difficult to understand, due to its linguistically experimental style of fictional words and phrases. It took 17 years to write, while the Irish writer lived in Paris.
It is set in Dublin, Ireland, with Finnegan building a wall. But he falls and dies. Finnegans Wake is Finnegan’s funeral.
The 17 chapters are divided into four parts. Lines start mid-sentence and end abruptly. There is much debate whether the characters are the same people, with different names, or whether they are discernibly different, or a confusion of the two. For readers who want distinct characters, there is the Earwicker family – father Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE), and mother Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), and three children (twin boys Shem and Shaun, and daughter Issy). It’s not that simple, of course, and there are many interpretations of the characters, the plot (or not), and what they are actually thinking and doing.
The language of Finnegan’s Wake is like the constructed Na’vi language of the humanoids in the 2009 Avatar movie blended with the Klingon language in Star Trek (1966). Na’vi and Klingon are much easier to understand and imitate than the language in Finnegan’s Wake.
In Finnegan’s Wake, there is seemingly no structure to the language, and there is an infinite vocabulary, unlike the fictional languages of Na’vi and Klingon. Lines start mid-sentence and end abruptly. While lyrical and beautifully rhythmic, the sentences are interspersed with a hundred-letter words and imperceivable phrases. Amongst the nonsense, made-up words there are real words that leap out, and which readers will hang onto, because they are familiar.
Admittedly, Finnegan’s Wake is an extremely difficult book to read, and not one of my favourite of Joyce’s works. Joyce is said to have written the book the way the human mind works, but even that is simplistically stated. It is not the way THE human mind works; it is the way A human mind works.
Creatively genius in its unconventionality, it never made its way onto the most popular books of all time. Depending on which version of the list of the greatest books of all time you look at, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) makes the list anywhere between number 1 and 45, with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) also making the list (as high as number 3 on one list), but Finnegan’s Wake only enters some lists, rating at best at number 77. That’s still significant, no doubt, but ‘greatest’ and ‘most popular’ are not the same, although both are debatable. Would I recommend it? Yes, if you have time, patience, imagination, and a love of words.
MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
After ploughing for months through Finnegans Wake, I tend to believe that it is a schizophrenic's autobiography that has been encoded with the help of 64 dictionaries. Lately I've set up a literary art experiment that merges the most beautiful book in English literature, the Kelmscott-Chaucer, with its most enigmatic one, Finnegans Wake? Evolutions in modern printing techniques have allowed to elevate this offspring of the Kelmscott-Chaucer from its black and white corset while avoiding the typographic setting that made for a difficult reading experience. The foreign language idiosyncrasies in Finnegans Wake have been replaced by their English equivalent and Joyce’s sibylline prose has been streamlined into a more fluid syntaxis. At this instance I’m releasing excerpts of Here Comes Everybody’s Karma through my website and an ARC can be obtained from NetGalley.
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