Finnegan's Wake

Click on the link below to hear Joyce reading the first part of the passage from Finnegan's Wake in our book. Read along, and then tell us what you think.

This would have been entirely lost on me without the recording. I’ve had awful issues with Ulysses that I’m hoping to work out. This whole section caught me by surprise. I thought I wasn’t in for this sort of trouble after reading The Dead, which I liked a lot. When he reads it, there is this beautiful flow to much of it. You can see the conversation of it and the words that look like nonsense, “Lord help me, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me!” When you hear him speak it aloud, you hear “Lord help me, Maria, full of grace, the Lord is with me!” which makes far more sense. He also threw in a couple different lines I noticed from what we have. I understand it’s a parting for the topic, assumedly a death considering the title. The writing is stream of consciousness, and not as lucid as we read with Woolf at all. He jumps about, but it’s interesting to see the words inserted for the spoken word to sound as he wished it to.

As I told Ash and Erica, few, if any, "get" this work, and most think Ulysses, let alone Dubliners, is more coherent.
Finnegan's IS stream-of-consciousness, but the mind in which it takes place is that of the whole of humankind, and its theme is the history of the world: the "novel" opens, "Rivverrun past Eve and Adams."
Good catch on the punning nature of the writing--and many of those puns are in other languages: scholars have identified over 80!