When bent with cares, and weight of
years,
periodically we must refresh ourselves,
not merely from the stream,
but in the deep.
-- Paracelsus
This first I did when still in my early twenties. Residing in a tiny chamber on the second floor of a
down-at-heels rooming house in one of the less-better parts of Berkeley, unemployed and quite penniless, having
just dropped out of the mathematics Ph.D. program, for lack
equally of the wherewithal for tuition, and of Vocation,
I turned to things that, being both dense and plain long, many of us go through life never having the time to tackle. Seated at a bare deal table, clad
in an old much-stained and -perforated labcoat which I had retained (for all outer-wear) from palmier days
in freshman chemistry lab,
I patiently pored over, reading and digesting from cover to
cover, and unaccompanied by any
appetizer (being at all events at
that time a vegetarian, more from
constraints of purse than of conviction),
such meaty main-courses as:
=> the Bible; all
seven volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu; both stout volumes of
the Wilhelm Meister Bildungsromane (along with occasional, shorter, not hors d’oeuvres but rince-gueles, from Goethe’s pen),
=> all of Kafka,
all of Orwell (essays and novels both),
=> along with several quite entertaining but l-o-n-g,
multivolume studies (Mencken American Language, cum supplements;
Havelock Ellis’ Psychology of Sex) and biographies (of Trotsky, of
Proust, of Freud).
Many a doctoral candidate in the humanities, at one of the
more exacting (non-Internet) universities, plows on through similar expanses,
but by professional exigency they are channeled along a particular
path, and even more hermetically chambered than sat I,
building brick
by (brick by) brick
that Babelian structure that will someday become their
dissertation,
crown of their youthful labors, mausoleum of all their
hopes,
which will (in most cases) be read by three people (those on
their dissertation committee),
and by never a man else, till the Sun wink out like a
candle.
For them, something as wide-ranging and unfocused as my own
reading-list of that time, would have struck any of their thesis-advisors as
mere gaspillage.
~
And now, with the leisure of an empty-nester, all earthly
debts settled, and the prospect of retirement so soon as I shall have received the nunc dimittis,
I turn again to certain lengthy works which, decades earlier, I might have
pecked at, but let drop.
Dropped not, unfortunately, because they contain a deep hard
wisdom for which I was as yet
unripe, but because, to this fitful cognition at any rate, they were, frankly,
wearisome, not worth the candle.
Hence I do not anticipate that, in the course of this current return to
masticating tough and leathery belts of prose, I shall be experiencing any
epiphanies. It is
unlikely that mine eyes shall, suddenly scaleless, peep forth astonished at a
bright new world, the way Phantastes
quickened CSL.
Nor that, changing careers yet again, I shall take up the
mantle as the Official Astronaut-Clown of the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, realizing at last that this is the very role for which Life,
all along, had been mysteriously preparing me.
It was thus that I turned, a few months ago, to the massive
heft of that doorstopper of a novel, much-praised but less-perused, Der Mann
ohne Eigenschaften, by Robert Musil;
the tale of that encounter (as yet incomplete), has been told here:
That project has alas
been shelved for the nonce, since, the stray epigram and choice asides
aside, that book is filled with what the French, with unsurpassable mot-justitude, denominate “longueurs”.
Such likewise has proved the case with much of Gibbon (half-way through that now), and --
though I sigh to say it -- with Don Quixote.
~
Now -- Not in
that studious spirit, but purely for relaxation, in spare moments, I recently reread
a slender and easy-to-read
novel, which I had already
breezed-through back in high school:
J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger
Man. It’s a
rousing good read, partaking of the spirit of much of Kingsley Amis (One Fat
Englishman) or William Kotzwinkle’s The Fan Man. It leaves not much deposit in the mind,
and none in the soul; but as I set
the volume down with a smile, I realized that it had whetted my appetite for
more Celtic matter -- an appetizer indeed, and no main course.
And thus it was that I turned, speculatively and with
strange surmise, to that unread-masterpiece to end all unread-masterpieces --
to plant a stake through the heart of all literature whatever -- Finnegan’s Wake, by Mr. James
“Jim” Joyce, late of Ireland.
In high school (or rather in that well-remembered summer
session at Mount Hermon; thank you
again, Mr. Zilliak!) I had
read (and loved) Portrait of the Artist, and various stories: short, and very accessible. Much later, after repeated
attempts, I finally forced myself all the way through the much longer and more
contorted Ulysses.
Its reputation among the exquisite literati stands much higher than that
of its youthful slender cousin, but
I am here to tell you that anyone who tells you it is a breeze to read, is
talking through his hat.
Beyond that lies only the cold northern slope of that nec plus ultra of ultima Thule -- Finnegan. Discouraged by the Ulysses experience, I never
made more than a half-hearted attempt to scale its cliffs, or even the scree
about its skirts, never reaching, in the course of a half-dozen sallies over
the space of many years, beyond (candor compels) the first page. No doubt, by the second page, things
pick up considerably; but I never
had the stamina to find out.
Now, however, much juiced with pep and zeste de vivre
after downing, in a couple of mouthfuls, The Ginger Man (with a
Guiness chaser), I pulled from its
shelf that dusty old Viking
paperback, its cover much-thumbed (and all the rest new as though fresh from
the bookseller’s), and (aided this
time by stronger spirits, again
from the Emerald Isle) sat down to
read with a will.
Yet -- vae mihi ! -- the Momentum that had been
accumulated (integrating the Impulse over the Interval) was quickly spent, not sufficing to
propel me even so far as the second paragraph, before, with a groan, and tired
of life, I let the volume drop with nerveless fingers.
Hours later, coming to my senses, I found the item on the
floor, among detritus, and -- unaccountably -- the usquebaugh-bottle
empty, as though having been meanwhile
consumed by some leprechaun.
Retrieving the former from
amidst the flotsam, I idly turned
to the inside-back-cover, and discovered a quotation that, many years ago, I
had written-in in pen, from William Empson, who, in his celebrated work
of literary-linguistic criticism, The Structure of Complex Words, calls Finnegan’s
Wake “a titanic corpse”, and puts his finger on what Jeeves would call the
“res”:
The trouble about the double
meanings in Finnegan’s Wake is that, since they are wholly artificial, one
cannot tell which way round they are meant to go.
~
Here matters might well have remained, save that, beside it
on the shelves, was a companion volume from Viking, A Skeleton Key to
Finnegan’s Wake, by Joseph
Campbell and H. M. Robinson.
Book-length itself, it is a sort of Thinking Man’s Cliff Notes. I had (decades ago) once read through
about a chapter of it, then let it lie;
and now I took up the volume again, to see what excuse these gentlemen
might be able to make, for the hundreds of pages of trickylinguistic gibberish,
of which I had shortly before
waded through but a pageful, before drowning.
And am forced to report, that this Skeleton Key is so
engaging, that it renews my interest into the lock (the seven seals) which it
claims to fit.
That is quite an achievement. Had the authors, Messers Campbell & Robinson, instead
bent their considerable talents to touting a washday product, rather than an
unreadable masterpiece, they might have retired as millionaires.
So there things stand.
I have resolved, not to tackle that meganovel again, until such time as
I shall have read through and digested this excellent adjutant. We have, in short, at this point
-- nothing at all; a hint at a
possible promise of something to
come. What I am hoping
is that, thus instructed, I shall eventually return to that hitherto-unchewable
wad, and extract some juice from it.
In which case, we shall have a tribute to Criticism, as much as to
Literature; for, unaided, I must
confess myself unequal to the
task.
More (
deo volente)
anon.
~
Another stout volume
from the same shelf, purchased in college decades ago, and now sitting on my night-stand, is Richard
Ellmann’s massive and standard biography, James Joyce. I have done no more than peck at a few pages (apart
from restricted sections read, not for Joyce’s sake, but for another
perspective on something else I was pursuing, such as the whole
American-exiles, Robert McAlmon
Being-Geniuses coterie). That book was first published anno domini
1959; and such has been my
dilatoriness, that it has since been overtaken by a substantially revised and
(oh no!) enlarged edition, published in the 1980s.
You’ve got to sprint as fast as you can, just to stay in one
place …
~
All this might fall under the rubric, Making Too Big a Deal
over a Book. Clearly, some-body
has too much time on his hands.
(Though for that matter, since
after all you are
reading this, so do you -- indeed, one level lower, an idler paravail.)
Not often just yet, in fact
-- this breather, from the accident of a weekend being bookended by the
President’s Day holiday plus a couple of snow-days -- but retirement is in
imaginable prospect, and several good friends have already retired (and report
they are enjoying it). And since, at our stately age, we
spend few of our days sky-diving or cliff-climbing (though one stubborn old
colleague still doggedly runs several miles a day, winter and summer), the
question of reading-matter does naturally arise. It is certainly a lot
more central to our time of life, than the impression you’d get from the Sunday
supplements -- “Sex at Seventy” or whatever. (Sex at Twenty was just
great, thankyouverymuch; but now it’s time to move on.)
~
There has sprung up
a sort of micro-mini-genre, which we may expect to expand as the boomers
retire (and possibly, in retirement, become even more narcissistic than we
already were) of book-length memoirs, purely parasitic upon some book the
writer has read.
As,
Reading
Lolita in Tehran, or the recent
My Life with Middlemarch.
There is something to be said for
a
bit of this -- and certainly it is
preferable to that other fad of self-strokers, O My Childhood How Cruelly Was I
Abused -- but one shudders to think of this sort of thing extending very
far:
Reading Lolita in
Poughkeepsie;
Poring
through War and Peace on the Toilet;
My Secret
Romance with “Joy of Cooking”.
[Update, President’s Day -- continuing with this mini-essay-fleuve]
My friend the Blindman writes:
My limited exposure to Finnegan
suggests it needs to be read aloud because a lot of the content is sound.
I replied:
You may have something there. I never appreciated “Paradise
Lost” until I heard it as an audiobook;
and Joyce’s effervescent work
cries out to be read aloud by an Irishman. Visually, the layers and lathers of puns are wearying; much of that would melt into the cadence of the dialect
speech. As, why Joyce wrote
“sprids the boord” rather than “spreads the board” I don’t know, and haven’t the interest to
inquire; but read aloud, you would
simply understand it right off, rather than being sent off on a fruitless
detour by the written form.
Just as with The Ginger Man, it is the sheer Celtic energy that sweeps
you away, and not this detail or that.
In a somewhat similar way, I found Milton’s syntax, read written,
annoying, but all that faded into the background in the recitation of the poem.
I have got much more from audiobook
Dickens -- which after all only
approximates its original frequent consumption, read aloud around the family fire -- than from the printed
page. Dickens has a
brilliant interpreter in Frederick Davidson. Whoever would successfully tackle Finnegan would need similarly excellent
qualifications.
For a single performer to actually read-aloud the entire book,
would be a labor both of heroism and of folly, reminiscent of those round-the-clock
marathon public readings of Gravity’s Rainbow in its entirety:
However, the Internet comes to our aid with convenient excerpts. Here, the opening page, rousingly read
by a wild Irishman:
[Update 23 February 2014]
I have now managed to wade through a fair number of pages of
the
Skeleton Key, without
however
yet
getting caught up in the sweep of its mythology.
Quite clearly, Joyce’s final offering is not a work to be
unriddled and deciphered, line by line, the way your would a Sumerian
inscription:
for one thing, it’s
far too long.
You either you
get swept up, or not.
So far,
not.
We’ll see.
If I ever do wind up doing a deep-dive
into that novel, it will be
not
merely to puzzle it out, but to absorb and inform it, as I did with the
Rootabaga Stories.
Nay more -- I am beginning to fear, that this late work of
the Irishman, is like that folly of the Frenchman’s dotage:
Il serait injuste de juger comme une œuvre achevée le roman posthume de Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881). Ces expériences incessamment renouvelées de la bêtise bourgeoise deviennent vite fastidieuse[s] et fatigantes …
-- G. Lanson, Histoire de la
littérature française (1895; rev. ed. P. Tuffrau, 1951), p. 1083
[Update 3 March 2014] In Northrop Frye’s essay-collection Myth and
Metaphor, I just stumbled upon his treatment of Finnegan’s Wake.
He too begins with a spot of bibliographic autobiography,
saying that when he first met the book as a young man, he was “in no position
to go into orbit around it” (the image is well-chosen). He proceeds to a brief and
appreciative précis, which reads like a sort of skeleton key to the Skeleton
Key.
It is quite valuable to approach an inaccessible work by the
guidance of someone whose mind you understand and admire. But alas, in this instance, the
exercise left me even less interested in Joyce than before. Because the otherwise unfailingly
companionable essayist here fails
to bring really anything to the table.
If Finnegan’s Wake can bring out the least-good in a fine author, then it is something better avoided.
[Update 26 April 2014]
A remarkably compact and trenchant summary of Finnegan’s Wake appears in the “Dream of H.C. Earwicker”
chapter of The Wound and the
Bow (1941), by Edmund Wilson.
He, mm, notices things that
other readers might not. If ever I do return to the attempt to
scale the north face of this intimidating mega-novel, it will be on the coat-tails, or rather the climbing-rope,
of such as he.
