What makes lifework leaving: reading Finnegans Wake to a one-month old

Does Joyce's epic of the fall find its ideal audience in one unfallen?

Two weeks in you could say we’re warming to each other. She begins cowled in my cotton robe, her little face pointed toward a page I know that she can’t see, let alone read. We get six pages before she starts hiccuping—which I try to hear as auxiliary percussion behind the prose—and then crying, which precipitates a diaper change. When I return from the nursery and reposition her head in my left elbow I can’t recall where to enter the text. Life with a newborn: a commodius vicus.

Left: Our newborn book club (including Penny, the tortoise exotic American). Right: Famous first words.

I don’t know exactly when I decided to read Finnegans Wake aloud to our daughter. I think it was around week 36 when the hospital bags were packed in the front hall and every small chore was haloed into a ritual of anticipation. Rachelle and I passed the time with whens. When she’s here, when the weather turns, when we introduce her … One was when we can read together. What would we read to her? What would she ask to hear again and again?

It was already clear by then how birth can facilitate recurrence across the generations: these anticipatory whens brought back some of my own earliest memories. My parents had read to me until I started reading back. Once my sister could read we’d end most nights with a chapter book, all four of us taking turns bringing the characters to life. (I believe this explains my unfortunate fondness for accents.) I wanted the same experience for our daughter. But I didn’t want to start with board books, Goodnight, Moon and Strega Nona. It would be a month or more before she could hold her head up, weeks longer still before color flooded her sight and she could follow the turning pages. There would be time for those, but the experience would be one of narrative-by-intonation, visual discovery, the bottomless pleasures of repetition. I wanted her to have a separate experience of language itself.

Some books wait for you. Finnegans Wake waited for Enza.

I start feeling lightheaded on page 20. Maybe that’s because it’s 10:30, we’ve been up since 5:30, and I’ve had only coffee. My body tells me to get up for water and a protein bar but Enza tells me No.

Or maybe it’s the language. Either way I can’t seem to stop reading.

Behove this sound of Irish sense. Really? Here English might be seen. Royally?

I had decided not to prepare for this. No study guide or concordance, no trip to the Wikipedia page. I even studiously avoided the marketing text on the back of my 1965 copy (“Embodying all author’s corrections”). I wanted to encounter the language almost as Enza did: with no preconceptions.

I did have some, of course. In undergrad I had taken a class on Ulysses that involved meeting weekly for tea with a Jesuit Joycean, one on one. I had studied at the W.B. Yeats School in Sligo and remained associated with the NY Yeats Society. I have attended almost every one of the Hassett Readings at Canisius University and visited the Joyce papers at UB. I served three years on the board of the Irish Classical Theater Company in Buffalo, which each spring raised funds through a pun-heavy and highly literary party styled after a “traditional” Irish wake. One can’t circulate these Environs without hearing something about Finnegan. But references tended to be passing, partial, self-censoring. I knew the book was an epicycle of ouroboruses; that you could pick it up and begin on any page; that it defied summary. I knew “riverrun.”

Nineteen days into her little life, I feel that Enza and I are as ready as we’d ever be. So we begin, past Eve and Adam’s.

I assumed that my English language comprehension would be my one, basic advantage over Enza in beginning this journey. I realized within a sentence or two that this wasn’t really true, because Finnegans Wake isn’t written in English.

Take this early and typical passage:

Upon Benn Heather, in Seeple Isout too. The cranic head on him, caster of his reasons, peer yuthner in yondmist. Whooth? His clay feet, swarded in verdigrass, stick up starck where he last fellonem, by the mund of the magazine wall, where our maggy seen all, with her sisterin shawl. While over against this belles’ alliance behind Ill Sixty, ollollowed ill! bagsides of the fort, bom, tarabom, tarabom, lurk the ombushes, the site of the lyffing-in-wait of the upjock and hockums.

My English can help me through these sentences the way my college Latin and Duolingo Spanish helped me navigate Granada in the off-season: clumsily, but with delight.

Eventually the puns, the portmanteaus, the lists and neologisms, the relentless innuendos of unencumbered phonemes start making sense. I realize this when Rachelle, who listened to the first few pages, but then took advantage of the rare break in Enza’s hunger to stretch her legs, asks me to catch her up.

“It’s kind of an unsummarizeable book,” I say.

“Try,” she says.¹

There’s this guy Finnegan, who fell off a wall, I begin with next to no conviction. He has an aunt or maybe a niece who’s always giving him a hard time. He’s maybe a giant or of an older race of beings. And his story, his fall, is kind of doubled in the story of H.C.E., Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, or maybe Harold, who’s a regular guy from the Dublin area. He’s also dead or dying but we learn about his life and his family and the land. The book is mostly digressions so far, and new stories with all the characters’ names switched.

Now, Enza and I are only about a fifth of the way through. (Her attention span is developing.) I don’t know if this summary will stand up. But my ability to venture a description of what sounded like nonsense reveals the deep sense-making power of the text. So far I’d say it deserves the highest praise of its sometimes bashful advocates.

And I’m not just thinking of myself: I’m far from Joyce’s ideal reader, but she’s not far from me.

Bear with me here: My experience of “going in cold” to Joyce’s final novel may mirror what Enza experiences in gaining language for the first time. As guides, she’ll have the context of our facial expressions and what happens when she hears certain tones and phonemes: feeding, dressing, holding, bathing, diaper changing. An innocent, she will fall into sense. Like her, I orient myself in Joyce’s text, guided not by parents but by everything I’ve ever heard or read, distant resonances that suggest how to move from one syllable to the next.

Of course Enza won’t remember this. She may construct a memory out of the story of it, as we sometimes do, but that isn’t the point, (I’m not seeding her lore the way you might a 529 account). I just hope that on some cellular level she enjoys this, the noise of it. And that Finnegans Wake will wait for her the way it waited for me. For her return.

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This post is a long way of saying you should expect the output of Organizing Isolation to slow down a bit over the coming months. I’ll get around to Part Two of the New Atheists essay eventually. I do have some exciting podcast guests coming up. But this spring and summer will be nothing like the last, full of tour dates and reflections. I’ll be busy with a new kind of “lifework,” as Joyce puts it.

Thanks for your patience!

1. Classic Rachelle.