Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake in James Joyce Reading Group

Aug 18, 2010 Ed Smiley rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read-joyce-and-be-exceeding-glad-fo

This is by far the best treatment of Finnegans Wake I have ever read. I am very thankful for a dear friend for sending me a copy!

Finnegans Wake is not for everyone (even though it is about everyone), and therefore a book of literary criticism about what is arguably the most difficult book ever written is not for everybody too.

So, yeah, this review is for those people, and maybe the insatiably curious seeking literary curios. So before I review it, let me lay my cards on the table. I'm not a prof This is by far the best treatment of Finnegans Wake I have ever read. I am very thankful for a dear friend for sending me a copy!

Finnegans Wake is not for everyone (even though it is about everyone), and therefore a book of literary criticism about what is arguably the most difficult book ever written is not for everybody too.

So, yeah, this review is for those people, and maybe the insatiably curious seeking literary curios. So before I review it, let me lay my cards on the table. I'm not a professor or anything like that, I've read Wake more than once, I'm a fan of Joyce, and I have read, as well couple of standard works. If I throw in quotes, they're from Wake, from memory; ain't no scholar, got it?

So, first off, imagine how suprising it is to hear a critic approach a literary work (or any work of art) by trying to sympathetically understand the author's intentions, which for some interpreters are highly problematic in the first place.

John Bishop, takes off from Joyce's selfdeclared intention to write a book about the night, the darkened mind, the dreamed world, and uses it to crossexamine and crosssection the mind of the dreamersubject that Joyce has created in Wake, who, like Humpty Dumpty has fallen, cracked, and not even fully bodyaware, his "humptyhillhead" and his "tumpytumtoes", and the needful obscurity and ambiguity of such a tale "retaled early in bed and later in life." Our hero is as helplessly inert as a corpse in a "seematary" as he dissolves into "every body" and "very biddy", and the hapless reader is hapless precisely because he comes to the book with linear expectations that are as thwarted as the hero's effort to make sense of dreamsense. Such is the beginning of Bishop's analysis, through which he threads the Egyptian Book of the Dead (the underworld as a kind of dream, the bream as a kind of death), the best explanation of Wake's relation to Vico's New Science (kids, it's not just cyclical history, it is the mind waking to conscious through language!), the infantile and interuterine states of consciousness, and the bloodmusic of his "cutletsized consort" pulsing though his eardrums, a "mamafesta" proclaiming the continuance of life (the Gaelic word for the river Liffey) "forriver."

What this book is not, is a territorial guide like Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake where Campbell and Robinson lead you with machetes, whacking away at the luxuriant linguistic overgrowth, and leaving a bare but discernible trail of myth and narrative, nor a en(t)omological one like Tindall's Reader's Guide where he euthanizes punwords pinned in attractive butterflycases. The map is not the territory, oh boy. This is more of a work in parallel in which he crossections the whole book on the basis of themes; this requires nice judgement, to avoid projecting an interpretation into a book that is endlessly evocative, and he is up to the task.
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Aug 24, 2020 Bob R Bogle rated it it was ok

Shelves: all-things-joyce

I was excited when I found a copy of John Bishop's book Joyce's Book of the Dark, Finnegans Wake because it is one of the most praised books about James Joyce's final literary work. Furthermore, people I know and whose opinions I respect have praised Bishop's book, sometimes exuberantly. I regret therefore that the time has come for me to write these few lines about Bishop's book, which I do not find to be so praiseworthy.

I was somewhere about half way through Bishop's extraordinarily repetitiou I was excited when I found a copy of John Bishop's book Joyce's Book of the Dark, Finnegans Wake because it is one of the most praised books about James Joyce's final literary work. Furthermore, people I know and whose opinions I respect have praised Bishop's book, sometimes exuberantly. I regret therefore that the time has come for me to write these few lines about Bishop's book, which I do not find to be so praiseworthy.

I was somewhere about half way through Bishop's extraordinarily repetitious book when it occurred to me that part of the trouble I was having with it stems from the fact that it's not written like a book. Reading Bishop isn't a normal reading experience at all. Instead, Bishop's book comes across as if you're hearing an obsessive professor lecturing on Finnegans Wake, only he's not really lecturing: mostly he's riffing on Finnegans Wake, pontificating exactly the way you'd expect a professor lecturing about his favorite book at the front of the class to do. Recognizing this made my reading easier and more satisfying, but only a little bit.

Bishop's thesis is simple enough: he asks that we take James Joyce literally and view Finnegans Wake as an account of a person asleep. Bishop certainly gives us plenty of support for his case, although how odd it is to hear a professor of literature argue that fiction ― and in particular fiction written by James Joyce, of all people! ― should be read literally and not figuratively or metaphorically. Not that I find fault with Bishop's thesis, but the argument is curious.

(I don't think Bishop's interpretation of Finnegan's Wake is the end-all, either. He puts forward a good case. Plenty of others can, and have, presented good cases, too. In the end, Bishop's point of view is one point of view: no less, but no more.)

Some passages in Bishop stand out for special interest, in my opinion. First among these is the chapter about the Egyptian book of the dead. The reader is able to learn a good deal here about Egyptology and how it applies to Finnegans Wake. This moment of clarity stands out in contrast against most of the rest of the book. When I read a book about James Joyce or his works, I do so because I'm interested in fresh insights into the man and his books that I haven't had before. In Joyce's Book of the Dark Bishop seldom illuminates Joyce or Finnegans Wake: he mostly pours more darkness on what is already an obscure subject. As a reader I have to wonder: Why am I reading this at all, if not for enlightenment but for only continuing endarkenment?

Speaking for myself, the experience of struggling with Bishop's book was a great, very long, tedious disappointment. Given the choice of hearing an enthusiast spend 479 pages raving about Finnegans Wake or reading 628 pages of Finnegans Wake itself, by myself, trying to work it out on my own, maybe bringing along a few boon companion authors who prefer to throw light on the subject, I'll choose the latter approach. ...more

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Mar 10, 2020 Big Hard Books & Classics rated it really liked it

This is a very scholarly book, indeed. Bishop's Edition of Finnegans Wake is also my favorite ... bigger boarders and more room for annotations 😁 ...more

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