On Not Reading James Joyce
My Three Encounters with Finnegans Wake
On a soft summer evening in a small town amidst the nothingness of rural Australia and just before beginning my first university degree, I met someone being spat out the other side of the tertiary education behemoth. 28, he was, and with a newly minted PhD in Philosophy. In the course of our conversation, he said he was reading two books: James Joyce’s Ulysses and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. As he was finished with his degree, he finally had time to read such hefty masterpieces. There was something horrific to me about this. I, 18, told myself I would read such classics before I turned 28.
That was ten years ago. I have read neither Ulysses nor Moby Dick. Today is June 16th, Bloomsday, the day Ulysses takes place. I have never celebrated the day because I haven’t read Joyce.
Except I’m not sure how true that is. What does it mean to have read a text? If we ask the question this way the answer seems obvious: to have read it from start to finish. We can make exceptions for short stories or essay collections, but it seems true of any novel or book. Yet if we reverse the question things are less clear. What does it mean to have not read a text? This can mean all kinds of things. To have not finished it maybe, but also to have not understood it. We are already, immediately, making distinctions and adding caveats. It gets even worse. Vladimir Nabokov, in his Lectures on Literature, tells us the first reading is the second; books can only be reread, not read.
Although it seems obvious one should finish a book or story, from cover to cover as it were, I’m not so sure it is necessary to put this standard on discussions of a text. Of course, one should read all one can; it’s a mistake not to. Perhaps it would be better to talk about encounters with a text, but it is not at all clear how this could be separated from some idea of reading the text. In Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read he champions a practice of non-reading, about engagement not completion. Engagement means reading about, going to lectures about, listening to your friends talk about a book. Or so I am told. I haven’t read Bayard and have no intention of doing so.
The question of reading, completion, encounter and engagement is a serious one for readers and writers alike. And so, on Bloomsday I offer you my three encounters with Joyce. Though of course there is a further displacement. None of them concern Ulysses – of which I have read some 80 pages – they are all centered around Finnegans Wake.
It is winter in Vienna. For me, it is always winter in Vienna. I am 21, and still have not read Joyce. At the Naschmarkt I thumb through an old, wrinkled tome. The Sunday flea market stalls often have cheap books, and often in English. In luxurious Vienna this is a small mercy. In my hands is a rather withered copy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. I purchase it, excited to add it to my ever-growing list of books I will never read. With Joyce in my bag I travel to the edge of Vienna. Under the shadow of the Wotruba church, a brutalist slab sat high on the last hill of Vienna, I open Finnegans Wake.
The Wotruba Church was built between 1974 and 1976, based on designs by Fritz Wotruba, who died before its completion. It is tucked away in the 23rd of Vienna’s 23 districts. One ascends, from the tram stop which is the last on the line and a good mile below the church, to the top of hill upon which it sits. The church is out of sight for this entire trek. There are no shops and no amenities, only houses and apartments. It is truly the end of Vienna. One turns a corner and climbs. If one times one’s journey right, just as the sun descends scattering yellow through the streets one will see the church rise up above you, a bunker of devotion backlit by the remains of the day. The church is a series of 152 beige concrete slabs, with a giant crucifix of black steel hanging over the altar. On the crucifix, where there should be Christ’s head mouthing pain is instead a hexagonal pinhead. One can die on the cross more than once.
Outside, the harshening yellow of a descending sun is cast through the leafless branches and onto the church wall. My back against the pure concrete of the auraless church I read Joyce:
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.
Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen-
core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy
isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor
had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse
to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper
all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to
tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a
kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in
vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a
peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory
end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-
ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-
nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later
on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the
offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan,
erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends
an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes:
and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park
where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since dev-
linsfirst loved livvy.
Something is wrong. I pause and read the text aloud. I sound everything out, and it is a delightful experience, although it is tainted by a sense of regression; I am back in kindergarten, sounding out strange words, wary of ever-present humiliation. The light is fading, it is time to return. I never make it past the first page. Later I fall violently ill. My mother berates me. She believes this old haggard copy of Finnegans Wake has infected me with some ancient bacteria. The curse lifts, I live to tell the tale.
It is spring in Canberra, Australia. I am 23, a student at the Australian National University, often drunk and frequently bored. I am yet to read either Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. A year ago, at this otherwise staid institution, I befriended a real reader. We bonded over a bottle of whiskey and some cheap discussion of Kafka and Wittgenstein. This is the whole point of attending an elite (Australian) university. He has read both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. On the tiny, inbuilt, single bookshelf in his dorm room is a curated selection of texts. Chaucer at one end, Bachelard at another. I ask him about all the other books we interminably talk about. He shrugs, tells me they are back at his folks’ place. One day, at the end of semester, I help him move out. Under his bed are three plastic crates of books. I take this as not a sign of sinful addiction but heroic commitment.
He invites me to a talk on campus, he says it may be of interest to me. Paul Magee, a lecturer and poet at the even more staid University of Canberra, is giving a talk on Joyce. I am keen for culture without commitment and so I agree to go. We bundle into the faculty talk, our presence disapproved of but tolerated. Magee tells his audience we have been misreading Finnegans Wake. The joke is on him, I have not been reading it all. He does not mean misreading in the usual sense, as a way to indicate that his interpretation is superior. Rather he means the book, in its standard edition, is mistranscribed. Joyce was going blind as he completed Finnegans Wake. His publisher was keen to get it out, but also ignorant of what, exactly, Joyce was trying to achieve. Magee has a compelling argument. The book makes sense, repeats motifs, has a method. It is not pure nonsense. Because of this, one can isolate passages where things really break down and figure out what a more plausible transcription might be. Magee shows his audience some passages. For effect he reads them aloud. A useful rule of thumb: the better sounding transcription is the correct one. There are now two Finnegans Wakes and I am yet to read either. I take a small consolation from this event: I have not read Finnegans Wake, but perhaps neither has anyone else.
It is summer in New York City. Like anyone else pretentious and confident enough to pen an essay on not reading James Joyce, I’ve made New York City my home. I am 28 and it is June 16th, 2021. It is a warm, ideal day. The sky is azure and cloudless. It is Bloomsday and there is a reading of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake happening in Prospect Park in an hour. Across 16 locations each chapter of Finnegans Wake will be read out by a team of volunteers. I will enter the park, proceed across the sites in order, listening to this book I have never read be read out by others. I will miss a bit here and there, but this is no different from skimming a passage whilst reading. After I have traversed the park, heard each chapter and headed home will I have read Joyce’s final tome or only encountered it? I do not know. If you, dear reader, would like to find out, you can meet me at the carousel in the park, where this novel, or at least this iteration of it, begins and ends. Then maybe we will know just what the difference between a reading and an encounter is.