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Wake?
Michael Chabon
JULY 12, 2012 ISSUE
1.
Like many admirers of the work of James Joyce, I had imposed
strict terms on that admiration, and around the work I had
drawn a clear ambit, beyond which I was unprepared to stray.
Ulysses and The Dead: crucial works, without which life was
something seen through a sheet of wax paper, handled with
gloves of thick batting, overheard through a drinking glass
pressed to a wall. Between them those two works managed to
say everything a pitying heart and a pitiless intellect could say
about death and sex and love and literature, loss and desire,
friendship and animosity, talk and silence, mourning and dread.
Then there were Araby, A Little Cloud, and Ivy Day in
the Committee Room, each a masterpiece, endlessly
rereadable, from which I had learned so much about short
stories and their deceptive power; one can learn a lot from all
the stories in Dubliners, even the sketchier ones: about point of
view and the construction of scene, about the myth of Charles
Parnell and horse racing in Ireland, about the pain of grief and
of missed chances.
Gisle Freund
2.
I got my first real glimpse of that beast in the Burger Chef
restaurant that used to occupy the basement of the Cathedral of
Learning, at the University of Pittsburgh, in my senior year,
when a classmate in Josephine OBrien Schaefers Ulysses
seminar tossed a paperback copy across our table and dared me
to open it to any page and make head or tail of what I found
there. At that moment I was feeling surprisingly equal to the
challenge. Under the captaincy of Professor Schaefer I had
sailed undiscouraged between the wandering rocks of Ulysses,
clear through the books later chapters, in which sense and
intention lay in ambush and rained flaming arrows of rhetoric
on us as we rowed madly past them. So it was with a traveled
keep.
Now, I know (along with everything else) that I am a know-itall. I avoid contests of knowledgeword games, Trivial
Pursuit, Celebritiesbecause they bring out an omnisapient
swagger in me that I despise. I also try to steer clear of puzzles,
because I have a tendency, in the solving of them, to lose
perspective. There was a broken combination padlock lying on
a coffee table at a party I attended not long ago; though my
hosts knew the correct combination, the lock refused to open.
At this partyor so I was afterward informedone might
have enjoyed excellent hors doeuvres, premium alcoholic
beverages, the company of witty and attractive human beings. I
spent the whole time wedged into a corner of the couch,
fiddling with that lock.2 That morning in the Burger Chef, I
could hear the book calling to me, whispering like the sword
Stormbringer seducing Elric, promising that if I were to lose
myself in it I would becomein the phrase leveled at Joyce by
his ever-skeptical brother, Stanislausa super-clever
superman.
I refused the call, and closed the book, choosing not to
brandish the paltry granules of sense I had so far managed to
pan.
Crazy, I said, agreeing with my classmates assessment.
Its supposed to be this guy whos dreaming, he informed
me. The book is one whole night, like Ulysses is one whole
day.
This information sealed the matter. I had already experienced,
in those first moments of my encounter with Finnegans Wake,
the most reliably dreamlike of its effects: the tantalizing way it
both hints at meaningdeep, important meaningand mocks
it. Dreams are the Sea-Monkeys of consciousness; in the back
pages of sleep they promise us teeming submarine palaces but
leave us, on waking, with a hermetic residue of freeze-dried
3.
Twenty-five years passed. At times the book would wash up on
the beach of my life and I would hear the bottled voice of its
djinn, promising everlasting bliss to puzzle hermits,
inexhaustible cred to know-it-alls. I always forebore. In the
meantime I fought my way, in some cases more than once,
through many other famously daunting tomesProusts,
Perecs, Pynchonsand thereby derived release from lifes
more intractable padlocks, and a pleasurable, quietly cherished
boost to my know-it-all amour propre.
Then, in the spring of 2010, I made my second complete ascent
of Ulysses, and came down hopelessly in love. Reading it at
twenty, I had identified with Stephen Dedalus, a grave mistake.
Stephen Dedalus is a pill. Doubtless I was kind of a pill myself
at twenty, but that didnt make Stephen any more appealing
even then. Still, watching Stephen stumble off into the Dublin
night at the novels end, one imagined him carrying on to
fulfill his glorious destiny as the fictional stand-in for James
Joyce, Great Writer; and in those days it was easy enough to
imagine all kinds of parallel literary destinies for oneself, lying
out there beyond the nighttown of Pittsburgh, PA.
Leopold Bloom was only an old dude, to me, that first time
through; charming, touching, good-hearted, but old: a failure, a
fool, a cuckold, crapping in an outhouse, masturbating into his
pants pocket. His uxoriousness was beyond my understanding,
as was his apparent willingness to endure humiliation. His
4.
It took a year, on and off; more on than off. I read it in beds
and on beaches, on airplanes, in the orthodontists waiting
room, on the toilet (it is a peoples almanac, a book of lists), in
Berkeley and in Brooklin, Maine. I even read it, in violation of
house rules against dream-contamination, at the breakfast
table. Over the course of that year I acquired five copies, of
varying size and vintage, carried the lightest in my man-bag
alongside phone, wallet, first aid kit, iPod, and a pair of little
plastic doodads that permit maladroit Western children to eat
potstickers with chopsticks, and took to scattering the others in
various rooms of my house, where those children grew
accustomed to the sight of that enigmatic object, the Wake,
ubiquitous as the little black pylon that haunts the Fifties
families on the sleeve of Led Zeppelins Presence.
In the wake of the Wake came, one by one, its courtiers: A
Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Joyces Book of the Dark, A
Finnegans Wake Concordance, The Books at the Wake, and all
those other texts that put themselves forward, like a swarm of
fezzed guides meeting a P&O liner, to ease and explicate the
travelers passage through the teeming cryptopolis. At some
point in the course of that year, my younger son and his
classmates wrote poems about their parents, immortalizing
their most salient aspects and traits, and in my sons poem I am
depicted, arrested for an instant in the midst of the eternity it
must have seemed to him, reading Finnegans Wake. If in his
poem he erected a kind of statue to his father, then Finnegans
Wake was the pigeon that had come to roost on my hat.
Whats it about? the same boy asked me, not long after the
omnipresent bird had first alighted on the paternal tricorne.
This was, distantly, the second-most-frequent question I got
when somebody saw or heard that I was reading Finnegans
Wake, after Why? The latter question was often, I noticed,
accompanied by a look of mild contempt or even disgust, a
wrinkling of the nose. A reader steeped in the work of H.P.
Lovecraft could not help observing that, to many educated
people, there was something unmistakably loathsome about the
Wake, a touch of Necronomicon, as though it had been bound
in human hide.
Ellmann tells us that Joyce himself referred to the Wake, when
composing it, as his monster, a pet name common enough,
perhaps, among writers long indentured to the service of vast,
metastasizing tomes. But in the case of the Wake the
appellation seems to refer to more than its mere bulk, more
than the seventeen years of obsessive and painful labor that the
beast sucked from Joyce, as his eyesight and his health failed
and the literary establishment, even that part that had
acclaimed the genius of Ulysses, hinted in stage whispers that
he was cracked. The monstrousness of the Wake is apparent
even to the most casual visitor, wrought like teratisms into
sentences that seem, as Lovecraft writes of dread Cthulhus
city of Rlyeh, abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely
redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.
Well I began, thinking that if I could explain the book to a
seven-year-old, I might have some hope of explaining it to
myself. Any reader of the Wake soon learns, thanks to that
Lorre-esque rabble of textual ciceroni, the self-appointed
locksmiths and cryptanalytic know-it-alls, that there are a
number of viable ways to answer the question of what
Finnegans Wake is about. The consensus reply, safe and
broadly unmistaken, akin to going with representative
5.
Other than its simple unreadability (indeed its apparent
hostility to being read), the principal knock against the Wake
what Seamus Deane in his introduction to the Penguin edition
calls the gravamen of the charge against Joyceis that, in
Deanes paraphrase, Joyce surrendered the ordinary world,
the world as represented in the great tradition of the realistic
novel, for a world of capricious fantasy and inexhaustible
word-play. Eliot, Pound, Stanislaus Joyce, Frank Budgen, and
other early champions of Ulysses found disappointment in this
apparent surrender, and the truth is that, for all the real,
nutritious, and hard-won pleasure that can be wrested from the
Wakeas from a bucket of lobsters, by a determined reader
with a pick and a crackeranyone who has first loved or
1George R.R. Martin must have felt the same wayit shows up as
a place name in his A Song of Ice and Fire saga.
2I got it open.
Qu hacemos con
Finnegans Wake?
2.
Pero tenemos que preguntar acerca del Wake.
Vale la pena? Joyce enloqueci? Nos est tomando el pelo?
La respuesta a todas estas preguntas es, enfticamente: s. Pero con
los siguientes condicionamientos.
Vale la pena leerlo, pero poco a poco, como un pequeo hbito que
uno adopta cotidianamente. Como meditar 10 minutos por da o salir a
trotar. Si eventualmente llegs a leer el libro entero, entrars en un
grupo selecto, como el de los que se han parado en la cumbre del
Everest o cruzado el mundo en un velero. Pero, ms all de semejante
hazaa literaria, terminars aprendiendo sobre historia, lingstica,
historia literaria, mitologa, geografa, poesa y varias disciplinas
esotricas. Finnegans Wake es una universidad secreta.
S, Joyce est loco. Enloqueci. Pero tal vez es la locura de Cristo o de
Buda. Para comprobarlo hay que leer su libro.
S, de cierta forma, nos est tomando el pelo. Pero tal vez como nos
toman el pelo los maestros Zen, enfrentndonos con enigmas y
contradicciones que nuestra mente en vigilia es incapaz de resolver.
Hay que entrar en un modo nocturno de pensar, de despertar dentro
de un sueo para poder aunque sea empezar a deambular dentro del
mundo de Finnegans Wake.
3.
sta es una manera excelente de comenzar.
> Ac tienen el texto completo online en ingls.
> Por otro lado, ac tienen el texto entero online, pero anotado,
palabra por palabra.
> Una ltima cosa: ac tienen un audio, extraordinario, de la lectura
completa de Finnegans Wake (son 35 horas). Entre otras
cosas, Finnegans Wake es una obra musical. Escchenla como
escucharan una pieza de John Cage o Brian Eno.
Esta es la base. A partir de ac tienen el punto de arranque para un
proyecto de lectura que no agotarn en sus vidas. Y que, si no se lo
toman demasiado en serio, los har muy, muy felices.
Antes de comenzar, escuchen la voz de Joyce mismo leyendo de la
obra. Mientras tanto, hganme caso y memorcense la primera lnea:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of
bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth
Castle and Environs.
Es como una linda cancin. Es como una oracin patafsica. Es como la
contrasea a una sociedad secreta. Es un pequeo portal a una de las
mentes literarias ms brillantes, ms bellas y ms extraas de la
historia humana.
Para investigar ms
Finnegans Wake the book the web was invented for (The Guardian.
28 abril, 2015)
What to Make of Finnegans Wake? Por Michael Chabon (The New
York Review of Books)
Anthony Burgess sobre Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake | The James Joyce Center
Pginas del manuscrto de Finnegans Wake
The Adventurer's Guide to Finnegans Wake by Ted Gioia