The Solstice Maybe Wake Night

Maybe the longest night of the year is the night on which the dreamworld of Finnegans Wake unfolds? A remark by Joseph Campbell & Henry Morton Robinson in their Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944) suggests they believe it may be so. From there sprung the premise for celebrating Finnegans Wake on the longest night of the year, HERE, meticulously arranged by Bobby Campbell. This webpage features comics, videos, links to various Wake-related subject matters (including links to recent blog posts by Oz Fritz on crossovers between the likes of Aleister Crowley and Francois Rabelais with Joyce), and other audio-visual Joycean treasures. There's a recording of a panel I participated in with several others, discussing all things Joyce and Finnegans Wake, plus Robert Anton Wilson, and also touching on Terence McKenna's Timewave Zero theory. 

Maybe Night, Solstice 2023

In the panel session, I mentioned Harry Levin's book James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, which was originally published by New Directions in 1941. Despite being one of the earliest critical works discussing Finnegans Wake, it still stands as a great entry point, on par with the Skeleton Key. (Later in the discussion I mentioned a quote that I forgot the attribution for, and it turns out that was from Levin's book: "The peculiarity of Joyce’s later writing is that any page presupposes a reading knowledge of the rest of the book. On the other hand, to master a page is to understand the book. The trick is to pick out a passage where a break-through can be effected.") 

Time Magazine reviewed Levin's book in 1942, noting that Joyce himself felt it was a rare reading which caught onto what he was doing: "The review of Finnegans Wake by Harvard's Harry Levin was one of the few that gave James Joyce the sense that his book had a reader."

It's worth quoting more from that Time article of 1942, which perceptively captured the Wake's relevance within the context of those tumultuous times:

In Finnegans Wake naturalism and the artist himself all but disappear; the book is a shimmering death-dance of chameleon-like symbols; an attempt at nothing less than a complete serio-comic history of human consciousness—in Levin's neat phrase, a "doomsday book," culminating in a Phoenician paradox of dissolution and resurrection. 
...
Finnegans Wake derives much from the philosopher Giambattista Vico's cyclic theory of history, which is highly apposite to the present. According to Vico, and Joyce, the first of a civilization's four phases begins, and the last collapses, in fear of thunder, and a rush for underground shelter; and in that sheltering cave, religion and family life begin again. Today the ambiguous thunder talks above every great city of the earth, and the shelters are crowded, and a civilization, if it is ending, is no less surely germinal. In one great warning work of literature after another, meanwhile, a similar mental cavern is retreated to and explored (Joyce's was a Dedalean Labyrinth).

Rare Recording of James Joyce Society Meeting in NYC featuring Joseph Campbell, Padraic Colum

This recorded meeting of the James Joyce Society of NY took place on Oct 23, 1951 at Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan. This a must-listen for Wakeans. Joseph Campbell provides a good introduction to newcomers and then reads select passages from the book, really capturing the lilt of the language beautifully. Padraic Colum shares personal memories of his old friend James Joyce. There is a Dr. Schwartz on the recording as well, and I thought it might be Delmore Schwartz (who was captured in a photograph with a group at Gotham Book Mart in 1948) but this Dr. Schwartz seems to have met Joyce personally which Delmore never did. Lately I've developed a great interest in Delmore Schwartz, reading his biography, his journals, and his letters, with no mention of this historic occasion anywhere so it must be a different Schwartz. 

The gathering sounds sort of like a Finnegans Wake reading group. Listening to it I could feel myself there in that tiny Manhattan bookshop in 1951, enthralled listening to Campbell explore the text he loved so much, and seeing James Joyce come to life in the reflections shared by those who had known him personally. This was only ten years after Joyce's death.

"It was cultivated with a meticulosity bordering on the insane" - one of the members describing Joyce's approach to writing Finnegans Wake.

The recording is on YouTube thanks to the account "repetition compulsion" who has also posted the Anthony Burgess FW video and has also shared a video of Jean Erdman (Joseph Campbell's wife) performing her musical play "The Coach with the Six Insides." 

The Pantheon of FINNEGANS WOKE (or Why Read Finnegans Wake? Testimonials from Famous Wakeans)

[A modified version of this piece was presented at the XXVI International James Joyce Symposium at the University of Antwerp, Belgium on June 15, 2018.]

In the wake of her husband’s death, Nora Joyce once remarked, “What’s all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book.” Eight decades later, even within the sphere of Joyceans it seems Finnegans Wake doesn’t often receive its due recognition. A recent example, on the back of the beautiful brand new fully annotated edition of Ulysses from Alma Books we find the following description of Joyce’s writing:

“...most famously Ulysses, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” They completely omitted Finnegans Wake!

When Joyce was finishing up with Finnegans Wake, he worried to a friend, “Perhaps it will end in failure, be a wreck or ‘catastrophe’ ...and perhaps in the years to come this work of mine will remain solitary and abandoned, like a temple without believers." (Portraits of the Artist in Exile, p. 160-161) In the spirit of the Wake, a book full of lists and catalogs, I have gathered this somewhat scattershot survey of notable Wake lovers. This is intended to be a celebratory assemblage, a panegyric of the tribe of Wakeans or FINNEGANS WOKE. The emergent pattern suggests an undercurrent of Anna Livia’s branching streams has been undulating in the unconscious of our art and culture for decades, perhaps a fitting fate for Finnegans Wake after all. 

[Please note: This is certainly not intended as an exhaustive list of Wake heads, just a representative segment of notable Wakeans and their expressed fondness for Joyce’s final book. Please feel free to add onto the list in the comments section!]

Joseph Campbell on How to Read Finnegans Wake

The approach described below could serve as a primer for how to study Finnegans Wake. In fact, Campbell very accurately describes the way we study the book in our Austin Finnegans Wake Reading Group.

In the Conclusion of The Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Campbell first describes Joyce's style of combining multiple words and punning on many different languages, often with rhythms that echo nursery rhymes, songs, prayers, etc. Following this, he shares these instructions:

This complex fabric of semantics, associative overtones, and stem rhythms is merely the materia prima of Joyce's communication. To this, add an enormous freight of mythological, historical, and psychological reference. It would be well-nigh hopeless to attempt to trace the design of any page were it not that a thread of logic runs through every paragraph. True, the thread always frays out into lateral associations which in turn disappear into almost inaccessible tenuities of meaning. Yet the main lines can all be followed. Joyce provides an answer to every riddle he propounds. In every passage there is a key word which sounds the essential theme. This word is supported, augmented, commented upon by other expressions in the same passage. Taken together, they not only indicate the mood but convey the meaning. The task of opening the way into any passage thus divides itself into three stages: 

1) Discovering the key word or words. 

2) Defining one or more of them, so that the drift of Joyce's thought becomes evident. 

3) Brooding awhile over the paragraph, to let the associations running out from the key centers gradually animate the rest of the passage.

Presently, the whole page will be alive with echoings and amplifications, re-echoings and sudden surprises. 

Amidst a sea of uncertainties, of one thing we can be sure: there are no nonsense syllables in Joyce! His language means so much that any intelligent reader can shave off some rewarding layers of meaning. The clarity and scope of the discoveries will depend almost wholly on the perception brought to bear; as the Master himself says: "Wipe your glosses with what you know." (FW p. 304).

Certainly there are many ways to approach the Wake. Mainly, I think you can break these down under two categories which we may call Horizontal and Vertical (as Scott from our Austin group termed it). Vertically, you dig down into each paragraph, sentence, or word to extract the dense meanings and references which may then bring meaning to the rest of the page or section. Horizontally, you just stream on through the musical, playful prose and let the sounds wash over you, triggering emotional or cerebral responses as they may.

The Night Owl speed-reading Wake group in Los Angeles I described here once certainly used the Horizontal approach. There is, no doubt, lots of fun to be had doing it that way. In our group here in Austin we use the Vertical approach, sticking with two pages which we examine and excavate thoroughly, just as Campbell describes. After two hours of discussion, usually we've identified the key words and phrases, defined them, pieced apart some puns, and eventually discovered the thematic "thread of logic." To close our sessions, we have one or two readers recite the pages in full, a touch of the Horizontal method. Just as Campbell describes, the pages do indeed come alive with echoings and surprises as we realize the thread of meaning is weaved intricately all over it.