Herewith the Wake

 Part I of Finnegans Wake, the first eight chapters, finishes on page 216 out of 628 pages so it's a third read if only one hundredth understood. Looking at the commentary on the next two chapters, it says it gets 'denser' from then on and we already can't see the would for the sleaze.

None of the 'action', such as there is any, has happened yet. There is hardly any. We've had puns, wordplay, the most erudite reference points to history, literature, philosophy and religion and it's been day time. Night falls at the end of Part I. 

This is surely a dead end in the history of the novel, it could go no further, except that Beckett et al took it into an Exagmination. It is, however, a dead end that's been everywhere. And all of Joyce is autobiographical, not only drawing on his life but also his previous work. We've had a catalogue of the stories in Dubliners, references to Ulysses and, quite pointedly, a few hints that T.S. Eliot took the idea, or at least the design, of The Waste Land from Ulysses. The commentary, if not so much the Wake, makes us aware of Giambattista Vico (Naples, 1668-1744), whose analysis of history and Yeats's 'gyres' originated from.

Having been introduced to H.C. Earwicker, the children, Shem and Shaun in all their guises and manifestations, Chapter 8 is the famous bit, on Anna Livia Plurabelle, the most famous, best and most comprehensible bit who, identified with the river, the Liffey, life, 'riverrun' gives us a more flowing poetry than the jokey, jaunty, disjointed rhythms of much of the rest, like the last words,

Telemetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of , hitherandthithering waters of. Night!

 

and who's to say that the 'sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing' poetry of Under Milk Wood, by the author of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, doesn't owe a debt to that.

 

I'm making notes on the commentary before proceding with each section of the text, two chapters at a time. It's not as if I'm likely to return to them once I've done enough to be able to say I've 'read' it but, like making notes at a concert to help with a review, it concentrates the mind so that one comes away with something. William York Tindall readily accepts that his 331 pages of Reader's Guide are inadequate to explain the Wake and so my brief notes on that barely tarnish the surface but at least one's tried where others, more sensibly, fear to tread.

In the meantime, alongside the Wake and the Guide, for light relief I'm reading the Selected Letters and so, thus far, am out of sync because Joyce at present in the letters is in Rome, imposing upon Stanislaus for money and help in a demanding way. Who does he think he is, he's still trying to get his poems and Dubliners into print. But I think he knows, like Bach, Shakespeare and Mozart must have done, that he's a genius.

He takes a dim view in these letters of George Moore, of Oliver St. John Gogarty and other contemporary novelists. Joyce identifies himself as a 'socialist' which, if open to some doubt as to what he means by it, at least sets him apart from the right-wing devotions of many of the headlining modernists. And, certainly, as per Stephen Dedalus in the Portrait, he's a Catholic who is simply not having it.

One can't expect to like a genius as a person. The genius is in their work and there isn't enough left over to make them gorgeous in real life. In these early days of exile, moving about, teaching, trying to find time to write, with Nora and two children to support, his letters back to Stanislaus detail how he accounts for every penny or lire on candles, food and a shave.

But, having got this far, one is in for a peony if one's got it in for Ezra Pound. We bloody loved Portrait at 'A' level and knew instinctively that Joyce was 'cool' and D.H. Lawrence easy to get good marks on but nowhere near as admirable. Lawrence took it too seriously for a start. And then Dubliners soon turned out to be the best prose fiction in the language and The Dead, with Nora's past in there somewhere, the most masterly literary art work I've ever read.

Some artists develop and go further into their method (Picasso, Shakespeare, Beethoven) whereas others carry on doing roughly the same successful thing (Haydn, Larkin, Hardy's poems). It's only worth exploring further if the further exploring goes into fertile territory. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake can't be accused of not having dome that. Having written something as great as The Dead, there was no point in writing it again. But whether we can all be expected to keep up with where he went after it is another question. It's neither our fault or his. What we are missing is what he'd have done next, had he returned to something more like Dubliners in later life and not died, just before he became 60, instead.