For Those Of You Who Are Reading Joyce This Year

Here's an amusing piece by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay et al) on his struggles with James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake that someone posted a link to in another group I'm in. I thought those of you who are reading Joyce for this year's challenge might enjoy it.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/12/what-make-finnegans-wake/

Thanks for the link, I ate that up. I know exactly the perimeter he's talking about. I've already drawn a line in my mind after Ulysses and before Finnegan's Wake, much as I really liked both Dubliners and Portrait (this article's author didn't care for Portrait at all, but he's entitled.) As a teenager I had a thing about reading every novel by an author I liked. I don't have that thing anymore and I'm not about to go looking for it, least of all in this case.

He's done some amazing thinking about the Wake, and I really like this idea: "In Ulysses, like Proust conducting his researches into lost time, Joyce showed that the clear eye and steady hand of the realist were adequate to the task of portraying states of consciousness, however fleeting or fragmentary, however stretched or shivered or distorted by the passage of time. In Finnegans Wake, with characteristic chutzpah, Joyce trained that modernist instrumentation on the stream of unconsciousness, and thereby, perhaps without meaning to do so, found realism’s limit."

I've definitely, when reading various novels with dream sequences, thought to myself "that's nonsense, dreams are nothing like that." When they get it most right, the dream is nothing but imagery and contradiction and the parts that linger in memory make little or no sense.

I'm not sure that I agree with the following: "If modernism in literature may be defined as a realism of the unrepresentable, then the Wake turns out to be a proof of realism’s impossibility, of the insufficiency of the instruments of mimesis to capture, convey, or even accurately suggest the measureless surreality of dreams." As this article says, James Joyce demonstrated very well that consciousness could be followed and documented to the point of the reader saying "yes, it's exactly like that!" I think a dream narrative can make a similar impression - but not succesfully tell a story.

The trouble in capturing and conveying a dream in narrative would be the lost meaning. Writing a normal scene, you can describe what the five senses perceive and a chronological sequence of events. In a dream state these are meaningless. A dream can reverse time, and you can perceive things that have no bearing on each other - a smell that does not match what you are seeing, etc. Your subconcious mind thinks nothing of these or any other contradiction, accepts anything as a matter of course. There could not be a story, a plot, no character development, none of the aspects of the novel that E.M. Forster says are essential (excepting theme, perhaps; maybe a dream could be considered pure theme, by nature.) Yet there's often layers of meaning to it, nonetheless - a dreamer at least understands the origins of the images he dreams, the entire history of encounters wiht the people who appear in the dreams, and much of it symbolizes the dreamer's waking life. But without breaking out of the narrative using massive footnotes or some other approach, there would be no means of conveying these helpful points of interpretation to the reader, so that they know what the dreamer in the story knows. Or else very thick exposition, costing the narrative any dreamlike quality.

So I think you could have a reader say "yes, that's what a dream is like," even if you could not transmit or prove the meaning of this particular dream. And maybe that's exactly what Joyce did here; write a book that you're forced to read without understanding much of it, in order to produce that sense of uncaring, accept-everything subconsciousness while in a conscious state. Beyond achieving that accomplishment though, I don't see what the writing's value would be. It's evident how hard readers try to find a plot, characters, story etc. in Wake that by rights can't be there if this is to be an accurate dream narrative. Can we credit Joyce with arriving at this same conclusion and his approach to the Wake is his solution? Was he aiming to insert additional meaning by introducing his recursions, playing up theme as his one available tool (incest, rebellion), etc at the cost of losing a bit of the "that's what a dream is like" quality? I think some version of what I've written here is probably the best book review I could muster and wouldn't be much better informed if I did read it, by the sounds of it, so I'd have to say no. I can comfortably take a pass at the attempt.

I think more than a few people have sensed the "perimeter", to judge from the number of copies of his works on LT. The numbers go up and up with each succeeding thing he wrote, and then suddenly ... lol

Ulysses 15,425 copies, 211 reviews
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 14,405 copies, 124 reviews
Dubliners 12,480 copies, 138 reviews
Finnegans Wake 3,456 copies, 40 reviews

Here's a couple more links on the topic:

Original review from the Guardian, 1939 (I love the first line):
http://www.theguardian.com/news/1939/may/12/mainsection.fromthearchive

And in case you care to imagine for a moment what an illustrated edition could possibly have illustrations of, here's the Folio Society's take on it:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2014/mar/26/finnegans-wake-james-joyce-...

I have a copy of it. But I am not ready to read it yet.