In the bargaining was the weird

 When I said I was 'getting' 25% of Finnegans Wake the other day, I was wildly overestimating. As William York Tindall says in his introduction to A Reader's Guide,

what authority on the 'Wake' knows the half of it? 

Even with his guide and another, any appreciation of what's going on that achieves double figures will be an achievement.

I began by thinking that by now, with an appreciation of the work of Stanley Unwin, The Goons, A Clockwork Orange and other such deliberately linguistically divergent adventures since 1939, we might be less inclined to be quite so challenged by Joyce's text but it's well beyond all of that. Tindall's book takes up to page 82, 26 of which are introduction, to summarize Chapter 1, which is 74 pages long. And even then he scribbles in extra notes at the end that haven't fitted into his explanation.

That is dense enough as it is and, as with reading Derrida or Foucault, for example, one wonders if the commentary is preferable to the real thing. But it's Finnegans Wake one is supposed to be reading so the plan will be to read a chapter in summary and then gaze at the novel itself. Impressively, the Wordsworth Classics edition, , from 2012, £1.50 from a charity shop, corresponds exactly to the page references in the guides, which is useful, but what a colossal achievement of typesetting and proof-reading it is, with almost every line containing at least one non-standard dictionary-available word.

There is really no obvious way into the book since it refers to everything, the 'characters' shift between several identities and 'meaning', to say the least, is unstable. But the focus of the first section is best seen as the sin and fall of H.C. Earwicker due to some vaguely specified incident in the park. Joyce came from a Catholic background and is thus drenched in the idea of sin. As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, a Catholic upbringing is something one can't escape as, perhaps, his own Marxist reading has proved to be. One can't become no-longer Jewish and these younger, non-racial cultures are apparently as difficult to remounce. It is a credit to any censor that banned Joyce's writing that they had the capacity to understand it well enough to do so.

I'm making my own notes on the guides as I go in the hope they will leave me with some tenuous grasp of what I've been through. Tindall's book seems a much more user-friendly aid than Bernard Benstock's Joyce-Again's Wake which is tempted too often towards its own obscurities rather than trying its best to make things as clear as possible. Tindall openly admits to not knowing and acknowledges a debt to a group he set up who shared their thoughts towards a better, communal appreciation.

In making this attempt on the Wake, however casual and peremptory it may be, I'm aware that I'm more like watching a documentary about an attempt on the north face of the Eiger than doing anything of the sort myself. I'm capable of little more than a walk up the Malvern Hills, but it's there and ought to be looked at as best one can. One can't leave the work of the author of Dubliners unfinished and so we will see how it goes. 

In the meantime, with Portsmouth Library Service currently excelling themselves and having book reservations ready at one's local library within two days, they are furnishing my impromptu Joyce Festival with the 400 pages of Selected Letters, too. The loans can be extended on the catalogue website from home. I might need to do that. They might not be getting these booksback for some time. And, in the likely event that nobody else wants them, I'd gladly give them a good home now I've extended my shelf space.

I'll hope to be still in the game after the next four chapters and report back. I did have a bit of a taste for the long haul, the 12 Hour bike ride, Proust, the Complete Works of Buxtehude but they were always within the bounds of sanity. I can't think of anybody else, however hard they tried, who produced anything like Finnegans Wake. It is surely more 'mind-bending' than anything else that set out to be. I'm not sure how much the author's mind needs to be bent before they attempt to bend the reader's. The saddest thing is the story that Joyce, who died a few weeks before reaching 60, was said to be planning to return to something more like Dubliners next. I'd love to read what that would have been.