I should start off by admitting that I'm pretty far behind in Finnegans Wake, mainly because I've been finishing off The Dubliners for a seminar by Karen Lawrence I attended tonight, but a few comments were made about Finnegans Wake that I thought were worth mentioning, and which will, no doubt, affect my reading.
Lawrence discussed the book's movement past language, which can at times make the book seem "unreadable." She noted that other modernists were breaking down the form of the short story or the novel or even the sentence, Joyce is literally breaking down the form of English, taking apart and building new words at will, and using 21 other languages to form his meaning. What has been most important to me as I've read the little that I've read so far is the musicality of the book (Sal, this speaks in some way to your turning to opera to understand chapter one, I think). Even though a fair amount of the words are made up, they read beautifully and speak to us in a way that moves beyond language, into a primal realm of music and sound. In some way, Joyce's meaning is beyond language, though I don't believe this means it is beyond comprehension. I suppose Joyce's meaning lives in the liminal space between language and feeling.
On a completely different note, Lawrence also mentioned Joyce's fascination with immortality and his competition with all other writers, including Shakespeare. She brought up his (famous) quote, "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality," and also his argument to Sylvia Beach that Ulysses "may be outside literature now, but its future is inside literature." It certainly seems that this is the case now, for Ulysses, but I wonder if this could ever be true for Finnegans Wake, which was ranked as the 26th greatest novel of all time by Daniel S. Burt in The Novel 100. Do you think Finnegans Wake will ever be considered "inside literature" or accessible in the same way that Ulysses now is? Would an understanding of this work (or any work) diminish the immortality of the author?
I think you bring up some really interesting points here. About the immortality of the author and the containment of literature.
ReplyDeleteI'm in the middle of several books right now (odd for me), all of them fighting against this containment model. And in someways I believe that this is true, that an understanding of a work will diminish it somehow. Like 'Pale Fire' by Nabokov. Would this work be a lesser novel if there was any consensus on what actually happens in the novel, on who Kinbote or Shade are? Yes, I do think so. Because then we would have an 'answer' to the novel.
Keeping the audience in mystery, but getting them involved in the mystery, is a tough and fine threshold. Basically impossible. A leap of faith is somehow necessary by both sides. And these books' lives somehow exist based on this. I mean part of literature's beauty is that which can't be explained - things that are slightly illogical but somehow make a whole lot of sense.