Finishing's Great

 ...would be the title I'd use when I finish Finnegans Wake. That isn't quite yet but I've finished the Readerr's Guide by William York Tindall and thus will gain no more understanding of it by reading the rest of the Wake itself although I will do that, all in good time, if only to say that I did. The Guide is from the library and due back soon, which was a good enough excuse to press on and finish the commentary I could follow rather than do it alongside the text I surely can't. I will sit and let the words of the second half of that wash over me in the same state of abstract oblivion that so much of it is set so maybe will get some of the artistic effect.

I come away from Tindall with 'some idea' of what the Wake is. Some idea of its shape, reference points, methods and, to say the very least, its complexity. Proust is like Janet and John in comparison and Tolstoy a mildly diverting short story. But it's Tolstoy I'll go to next, on the tip from Joyce's letters, that How Much Land Does a Man Need? was the best story he'd ever read. Possibly before he read the best story he ever wrote, The Dead.

I estimate my understanding of the Wake at maybe 10% and certainly nothing like 20%, and nearly all of that depending on the guide. We were always warned off the editions of exam-passing notes that one could furtively smeak a look at to clarify set books and told to engage with the text. That was, no doubt, right in a puritanical way but I'm sure we all did it at one time or another. But it also depends on the complexity of the text. No, I don't think students should need ro refer to cribs as an aid to Hardy or Dickens or George Eliot but I can see why, when books are deliberately written in a difficult way, students needing things to say about them need to be shown the way. And by the time you get to Finnegans Wake, we surely all do.

Any number of 'progressive' rock artist could have been said to be self-indulgent but they were as nothing compared to James Joyce.

Given the standards expected these days to achieve a degree in Literature, I reckon I might get a 2:1 on the Wake on the strength of having read the notes. First of all, the examiners need to find somebody who knows enough about it to say I'm wrong unless they mark it on a check list of points made.

Does he say that H.C. Earwicker stands for 'Here Comes Everybody'. Yes. Tick.

Does he say that it's based on Vico's cycles of history. Yes. Tick.

Does he say anything about D.H. Lawrence's reaction that it is was 'deliberate journalistic dirtry-mindedness. Yes. Tick and I'm on my way to a first because if professors who have spent their whole lives on it say they have maybe only de-coded half of it, how much can they expect from an under-graduate who has other courses to do.

No, that's fine. I'm glad to have got as far as I have and it'll be fine. Whichever other art one has thought attempted to breach the frontiers of madness - Dali, Bosch, Wagner or Val Doonican, they can all be excused and put into the mainstream in the light of the Wake. It hasn't done Joyce any favours as far as I'm concerned except for the wonder at the vast intellect and neither did the letters. He's betterr off being known for Dubliners and the Portrait but, having admired them to distraction, one can't help but go further and, whenever one goes further one eventually goes too far. 

We can't help but enquire into our heroes furrther and then we find out enough to diminish what we had thought of them.

My own autobiographical note says I was born in Nottingham in 1959 and now live in Portsmouth. It says what my last book of poems was and says I'm here doing this. That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.