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The Finnegans Wake Experience
Hardcover University of California Press 1981
130 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1981
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 18, 2012
I think the jury is still out as to whether or not James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is readable at all, but Roland McHugh tackled it head-on, devoting years of his life to studying it with zealous devotion. The entomologist turned Wake expert admits, “My technique was slightly fanatical. I was so anxious to capture the undistorted experience than on reading page 29, where the first chapter ends, I tied a thread round all the remaining pages to prevent my accidentally looking ahead.” To anyone who has skimmed a page or two of Finnegans Wake, it’s hard to imagine that looking ahead could create any real spoiler problems, but McHugh was a purist.
And that was just the first reading. McHugh went on to read, dissect, and scrutinize Finnegans Wake with complete thoroughness, telling us, “I began to annotate my copy of FW. I transferred information to it in very small writing, using a mapping pen. I could actually get two lines of writing between every two FW lines, and I used twelve different colours of ink to specify different languages.”
Soon Joyce’s inscrutable novel began to influence McHugh’s non-literary profession, when McHugh, “having left Imperial College far too obsessed with FW to think seriously about a career,” takes a job studying grasshopper acoustics in Paris, thinking that improving his French will help him with his Wake studies. He later tells us, “I was becoming increasingly convinced that to achieve a really total appreciation of the FW text I needed to move permanently to Ireland.” He did indeed make that move. I’m not sure whether or not he gave up bugs altogether, but he did eventually become a noted Joyce scholar.
As literary criticism goes, The Finnegans Wake Experience is quite entertaining, though it does raise concerns for the author’s sanity. That’s probably appropriate, though, considering that Finnegans Wake called into question Joyce’s mental health as well. From the standpoint of encouraging slightly less, shall we say, enthusiastic Joyce fans to tackle the Wake, however, The Finnegans Wake Experience is a bit demoralizing.
And that was just the first reading. McHugh went on to read, dissect, and scrutinize Finnegans Wake with complete thoroughness, telling us, “I began to annotate my copy of FW. I transferred information to it in very small writing, using a mapping pen. I could actually get two lines of writing between every two FW lines, and I used twelve different colours of ink to specify different languages.”
Soon Joyce’s inscrutable novel began to influence McHugh’s non-literary profession, when McHugh, “having left Imperial College far too obsessed with FW to think seriously about a career,” takes a job studying grasshopper acoustics in Paris, thinking that improving his French will help him with his Wake studies. He later tells us, “I was becoming increasingly convinced that to achieve a really total appreciation of the FW text I needed to move permanently to Ireland.” He did indeed make that move. I’m not sure whether or not he gave up bugs altogether, but he did eventually become a noted Joyce scholar.
As literary criticism goes, The Finnegans Wake Experience is quite entertaining, though it does raise concerns for the author’s sanity. That’s probably appropriate, though, considering that Finnegans Wake called into question Joyce’s mental health as well. From the standpoint of encouraging slightly less, shall we say, enthusiastic Joyce fans to tackle the Wake, however, The Finnegans Wake Experience is a bit demoralizing.
August 29, 2011
Finnegans Wake is very famous for being unreadable, and all the stories are completely true. This is not so much a book about Finnegans Wake as a book about extreme fanboy behaviour.
Therefore file next to Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer's comedy masterpiece about not writing a book about D H Lawrence, and U & I, Nicholson Baker's delightful essay about his inability to read much more than a paragraph by John Updike without howling in pain; and Razor's Edge, Andrew Muir's rueful mea culpa about the further reaches of Bob Dylan worship.
Roland McHugh powered through Ulysses, then flirted with Finnegans wake, then decided no one had previously read the Wake correctly, & so decided to do it - PROPERLY. By yourself, with only your native wit and a good pre-google encyclopedia to guide you.
The literary equivalent of walking naked through the kalahari Desert and drinking your own urine and sleeping in the bowels of slaughtered goats to survive.
(I know that's how you do it. I can't tell you how I know.)
So, Roland McHugh's book is the funniest book of literary criticism i have ever read. Not for everyone, but for Joyce fans, it's as good as a new series of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Can there be higher praise?
Therefore file next to Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer's comedy masterpiece about not writing a book about D H Lawrence, and U & I, Nicholson Baker's delightful essay about his inability to read much more than a paragraph by John Updike without howling in pain; and Razor's Edge, Andrew Muir's rueful mea culpa about the further reaches of Bob Dylan worship.
Roland McHugh powered through Ulysses, then flirted with Finnegans wake, then decided no one had previously read the Wake correctly, & so decided to do it - PROPERLY. By yourself, with only your native wit and a good pre-google encyclopedia to guide you.
The literary equivalent of walking naked through the kalahari Desert and drinking your own urine and sleeping in the bowels of slaughtered goats to survive.
(I know that's how you do it. I can't tell you how I know.)
So, Roland McHugh's book is the funniest book of literary criticism i have ever read. Not for everyone, but for Joyce fans, it's as good as a new series of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Can there be higher praise?
April 30, 2014
Row! Land is outa site! Hour here, o! and nyte in shy-Ning armore! We fallow in yore phutsteps and pray's yew from route to branch.
February 27, 2019
This book was written by Wake expert and esteemed author of Annotations to Finnegans Wake, Roland McHugh, and was first published shortly after the completion of Annotations in 1981. It's an amusing depiction of McHugh's obsession with deciphering Finnegans Wake, and although I'm a bit obsessed myself about its elucidation, I probably (read definitely) won't use the McHugh method. One has to admire his resolve to figure it out on his own, so to speak, by using Joyce's own manuscripts and notebooks to name but a few sources, and painstakingly analyzing and re-analyzing the text over the course of a 25 year period to come to an interpretation of its meaning. He even went as far as tying a string around the remaining pages when he had read the first episode (p. 29) to prevent himself looking ahead. Bravo, Mr. HcHugh!
The first chapter picks one short passage (about 15 lines) from each of the four parts of the book and spends 23 pages explaining them. This gives the reader an idea of the complexity of trying to figure out what the remaining lines (totaling roughly 626 pages) might mean. This might kill a reader's interest in Finnegans Wake right there, but, as was my case, it also encourages the interested reader to find out more.
Another chapter of the book gives McHugh's opinion on additional Wakean criticisms and books, many of them famous and widely used today, others a little more obscure. It's interesting that his opinion of some of the more popular sources used today was not very high. Other notable chapters outline his exploration of The British Museum Manuscripts and The Buffalo Notebooks.
All in all, this is a short interesting read and I would recommend it to anyone planning to read Finnegans Wake.
As a final note, who knows what might have materialized had Joyce not died only two years following publication of Finnegans Wake? We might have eventually had one of Joyce's confidants like Budgen or Beckett do for Finnegans Wake what Stuart Gilbert did for Ulysses. Alas, it wasn't to be, but I take comfort in the fact that there is now enough Joyce scholarship out there today to give the enthusiast a good starting point to begin the journey of deciphering Finnegans Wake, maybe with the chance of getting some comprehension within a few readings and in under 25 years! I've been through episode 1 (p.29), and I'm not planning to tie a string around the remaining pages!
The first chapter picks one short passage (about 15 lines) from each of the four parts of the book and spends 23 pages explaining them. This gives the reader an idea of the complexity of trying to figure out what the remaining lines (totaling roughly 626 pages) might mean. This might kill a reader's interest in Finnegans Wake right there, but, as was my case, it also encourages the interested reader to find out more.
Another chapter of the book gives McHugh's opinion on additional Wakean criticisms and books, many of them famous and widely used today, others a little more obscure. It's interesting that his opinion of some of the more popular sources used today was not very high. Other notable chapters outline his exploration of The British Museum Manuscripts and The Buffalo Notebooks.
All in all, this is a short interesting read and I would recommend it to anyone planning to read Finnegans Wake.
As a final note, who knows what might have materialized had Joyce not died only two years following publication of Finnegans Wake? We might have eventually had one of Joyce's confidants like Budgen or Beckett do for Finnegans Wake what Stuart Gilbert did for Ulysses. Alas, it wasn't to be, but I take comfort in the fact that there is now enough Joyce scholarship out there today to give the enthusiast a good starting point to begin the journey of deciphering Finnegans Wake, maybe with the chance of getting some comprehension within a few readings and in under 25 years! I've been through episode 1 (p.29), and I'm not planning to tie a string around the remaining pages!
April 9, 2016
Can't yet get more than 15 pages into Finnegan's Wake so read four books about it.
"When he moved out of Paris during the Nazi occupation he left (the manuscripts) behind, conceivably feeling he had done well to let chance determine their survival. The notebooks outlasted the war; Joyce didn't."
"As Clive Hart once said to me "Our lives are full of f%*&ing symbols: we don't need them in our reading matter as well."
"When he moved out of Paris during the Nazi occupation he left (the manuscripts) behind, conceivably feeling he had done well to let chance determine their survival. The notebooks outlasted the war; Joyce didn't."
"As Clive Hart once said to me "Our lives are full of f%*&ing symbols: we don't need them in our reading matter as well."
January 26, 2015
Some nice insights and a few odd slams.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews