More keys.  As Anna Livia Plurabelle says or thinks or dreams at the very end of Finnegans Wake, “The keys to.”  She is falling asleep so she unfortunately does not finish the sentence.  Some keys to the Wake: languages, literature, and themes. Languages In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Menard considers – rejects, but still, considers – the idea of really understanding Don Quixote by recreating the experiences of Cervantes: learning his language, reading the books he read, getting captured by pirates, and so on.  I have the impression that some Joyceans, some Wakeists, have tried to do this, to learn all of Joyce's languages and every detail about Dublin and acquire an Irish Jesuit education of the 1890s.  Joyce was a cognitively unusual person, but perhaps this is possible collectively.  This researcher tracks down the Finnish references, that one egghausts the egg theme.  Who here knows Romansh?  Joyce knew Romansh, and like everything he knew it is in Finnegans Wake. I read Ulysses and Joyce’s earlier books as an undergraduate but only poked at Finnegans Wake.  I realized that among other limits my languages were inadequate.  But since then I have learned French (hugely helpful) and to some degree Portuguese (minimally helpful) and picked up at least some words in German and a few other languages.  Gaelic and that Jesuit Latin are what I really needed.  But still: The older sisars (Tyrants, regicide is too good for you!) become unbeurrable from age… (162) Beurre is butter and fromage is cheese, and Butter and Cheese are Brutus and Cassisus, the regicides of “sisar.”  Beurre and fromage are common French words, menu words, but thirty-five years ago I did not know them.  The joke in the line was unseeable.  And I now know that in German cheese is Käse which gets me to Cheesey Cassius again.  And then I look up the Latin for cheese, which is caseus, which means this is not even Joyce’s joke, but something as old as, well, whenever schoolboys started learning Roman history and Latin at the same time.  Joyce is just spinning it out.  Large chunks of Finnegans Wake are just Joyce having his fun. He is almonthst on the kiep fief by here, is Comestipple Sacksoun, be it junipery or febrewery, marracks or alebrill or the ramping riots of pouriose and froriose.  (15-6) I think I knew what arrack was, and I think I knew that the French Revolutionists had given the months goofy new names – Showery and Flowery – so this boozy line I would have gotten.  Maybe. Literature Near the beginning of Chapter V of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “[t]he rainladen trees” are making young Stephen Dedalus think “as always” (!) of “the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann,” from which he passes to “the cloistral silverveined prose of Newman” and then on to Cavalcanti, Ibsen, Ben Jonson, Aristotle, Aquinas, and “the Elizabethans.”  I first read this passage when I was 18, in this class; Hauptmann, Newman, Cavalcanti, Jonson, and maybe even Ibsen might as well have been fictional.  I’d never heard of them.  Now, decades later, I’ve read multiple works by all of them, and Dedalus’s intellectual and artistic world is clear to me. We read more and learn more.  I’ve read Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1725), which helped, although my big surprise was how much of the literary stuff of the Wake was childhood reading: Lewis Carroll and Huckleberry Finn; Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels.  Lots of mentions of Swiftiana – Yahoos and Houyhnhnms; Stella and A Tale of a Tub.  Plenty of other Anglo-Irish writers, Sterne and Addison and Shaw.  Look, “ghuest  of innation” (414), it’s Frank O’Connor for some reason.  Swift and Sterne and Carroll are kindred spirits to Finnegans Wake but otherwise I do not understand how Joyce uses these references.  If I tracked down the mentions of Swift would a pattern emerge? I wonder how fair Joyce plays.  The literary references I can see are to titles, characters, and the most famous quotations: where the bus stops there shop I (540) The Tempest for some reason.  Now, looking at the page, I suspect everything of being a parody of a quotation I do not recognize.  And I just saw, looking at that page, a reference to Henry Fielding I missed, “Jonathans, wild and great.”  And a reference to Daniel Defoe in the previous line. Themes Or motifs, of the kind I associate with Flaubert.  Not that horses or cigars are symbols, but work through the horse theme or the cigar theme in Madame Bovary and interesting patterns appear, deliberate creations of Flaubert.  Ulysses has plenty of this kind of thing, but Finnegans Wake is so overwhelming that I do  not know how to apply the method. He was poached on in that eggdentical spot.  (16) The eggs are everywhere.  Humpty Dumpty first appears on the first page, as part of poor Finnegan’s fall from the ladder, “the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends… in quest of his tumptytumtoes” (3), the last on the last page, “humbly dumbly” (628).  The eggs have a mythic, symbolic meaning, as part of the cyclical story of the children reborn as the parents.  Humpty Dumpty is put back together in Joyce’s world.  This symbolic level is so clear as to be banal.  So what else is going on?  The eggs are everywhere. I see how this book becomes a hobby for some readers.  Gives you a lot to do if you want.  Of course at this point it is all catalogued and interpreted.  Someone else has compiled the concordance.  I can just look up the eggs and Swifts and Romansh.  Is that more fun or less?

I am too tired to write about Finnegans Wake which is a good state for writing about this dream novel where characters keep falling asleep.  “Dream” is conventional wisdom but I will note that no part of the book resembles any dream I have ever experienced or read about, although I am willing to believe that James Joyce’s dreams were mostly massive blocks of multilingual puns. A dream of favours, a favourable dream.  They know how they believe that they believe that they know.  Wherefore they wail.  (470) Who is the dreamer, Alice or the Red King, or both?  Both, at the very least both. Two dreamyums in one dromium?  Yes and no error.  And both as like as a duel of lentils?  Peacisely.  (89) Imagine the puns Joyce did not include. I accept the dream but reject the idea that since Ulysses is a day then Finnegans Wake is a night.  Ulysses is also a night.  A “day” includes a period of time called “night.”  Did these people not read the “Nighttown” chapter of Ulysses? Establishing time is actually not so high on the list of the difficulties of Finnegans Wake.  Joyce minimizes and disperses the usual novelistic clues about setting, situation, and narrators.  I am used to being patient about these things, but hoo boy.  In the first chapter, for example, which I am pretty sure is in a Dublin pub where mourners are drinking and drinkers are mourning the death of “freeman’s maurer” (6, bricklayer, wall builder) Finnegan, the speaker could plausibly be one extremely voluble drunk or a multitude of voices.  No idea. The action is so obscure that plot summary is speculation.  The plot exists on multiple levels, and I had trouble establishing myself in one.  I was most comfortable at the mythic level, where characters are hills and rivers or gods enacting a cycle of “the commodius vicus of recirculation” (3).  The domestic, Dublin level, which in some ways is the most ordinarily novel-like, was extremely difficult, difficult just to figure out what the heck is supposed to be happening on any given page.  I do have an idea about what HCE did in the park that led to the gossip about him.  I guess that is the domestic plot? The great shift Joyce makes takes that almost moves the book out of the genre of the novel is that the characters are barely characters.  They have symbolic and allegorical functions often of real richness, but do not have personalities.  They are not people.  Ulysses for all of its fuss and fireworks, is full of people, one of whom is among the greats of fiction.  In the usual, and some unusual, novelistic ways, I know Leopold Bloom, which is not true of any of the Finnegans Wake puppets. This is a complaint.  It is a shame to see a master artist give up something he is so good at, whatever else he might be doing. There is a near exception that has a parallel in Molly Bloom's chapter in Ulysses.  The dipper into Finnegans Wake will surely read the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” chapter, I.8, with the two riverside washwomen who turn into a stone and a tree while discussing the novel’s principle female figure.  In the last nine pages, in a single paragraph, Anna for the first time (??? – everything I say about this book should be buried in question marks) speaks or dreams in her own voice, a passage of unusual poetic beauty.  On the last page Anna is turning into a river but also falling asleep: My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I'll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! This is the ending from The Tempest, from One Hundred Years of Solitude and Little, Big, the ending where we come to the last page of the book.  That “toy fair” was once said to Joyce by his infant son.  Joyce is rarely adorable. Then we get the last reference to Humpty Dumpty, mirroring the one on the first page, then the gulls and “Finn, again!” and we are ready to turn back to the first page perhaps after a good night's sleep. Tomorrow I will poke around the remains of Humpty Dumpty.

Over the last month I read Finnegans Wake (1939).  I first read some bits of it in college, in a Norton Anthology of British Literature, and other, although mostly the same, bits occasionally, mostly to remind myself what they looked like.  Anyone interested in literature should sometime read a few pages just to see what it looks like.  Last year I became curious about how readers saw Joyce’s text while it was appearing in various magazines as Work in Progress.  Did I miss the book that collects and discusses these first pieces?  Enough are in the public domain now to make an interesting book.  Admittedly at some point the map becomes the territory, and printing all of Work in Progress is just publishing Finnegans Wake in a screwy order. Speaking of which, this is going to be a true ramble.  I read without a key or a guide, although I certainly looked up plenty of things.  Finnegans Wake is a book for people who like to look things up.  But I mostly just read it, or at least looked at it.  I looked at every word, mostly in order. Now, kapnimancy and infusionism may both fit as tight as two trivets but while we in our wee free state, holding to that prestatute in our charter, may have our irremovable doubts as to the whole sense of the lot, the interpretation of any phrase in the whole, the meaning of every word of a phrase so far deciphered out of it, however unfettered our Irish daily independence, we must vaunt no idle dubiosity as to its genuine authorship and holusbolus authoritativeness. (117-8) The bold is mine, a desperate attempt to extract meaning from mishmash but the words are Joyce’s.  He knows how this looks.  And this is, as Finnegans Wake goes, almost a plain old sentence.  I was always amused when a plain old sentence appeared, like: But the strangest thing happened.  (470) Or: All the world loves a big gleaming jelly.  (274) Or: That is more than I can fix, for the teom bihan, anyway.  So let I and you now kindly drop that, angryman!  That’s not French pastry.  You can take it from me.  (412) A genuine key to Finnegans Wake is that much of the text is on one level speech, so hearing it in the voice of your favorite ranting Irishman solves a number of problems; “teom bihan” becomes easy enough.  I used the voice of the great Jinx Lennon (explore widely, but be warned that Jinx is noisy).  It helped to make him drunker and more into wordplay.  Puns, the puns, the endless puns. Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to be Mister Finnagain!  Comeday morm and, O you’re vine!  Sendday’s eve and, ah, you’re vinegar!  Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you’re going to be fined again! And this with poor Finnegan stretched out dead right in front of this joker.  Although he does get better.  This passage is a just example of Joyce’s bad habit of working through every combination, which I may complain about more later, but my question here is: Should, and I mean this as an ethical question, should the pun be the fundamental principle of prose writing? (technologically, let me say, the appetizing entry of this subject on a fool chest of vialds is plumply pudding the carp before doevre hors) (164) I mean, that is what I call a groaner.  This is the section where Brutus and Cassius assassinate Caesar but have been turned into Butter and Cheese, so there are food puns everywhere.  Multilingual food puns.  Omnilingual everything puns. Somewhere I remember Anthony Burgess writing that he found a good laugh on every page of Finnegans Wake.  My rate was not so high.  I got a good laugh here: … and by all means, after a good ground kiss to Terracussa and for wars luck our lefftoff's flung over our home homoplate, cling to it as with drowning hands, hoping against hope all the while that, by the light of philophosy, (and may she never folsage us!) things will begin to clear up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour and be hanged to them as ten to one they will too, please the pigs, as they ought to categorically, as, stricly between ourselves, there is a limit to all things so this will never do.  (119) I sound like I am complaining.  Yes and no.  Let’s ramble for another couple of days.  I may eventually draw near a point.

I will write about two newly published translations of Spanish novels that comprise an amusing stunt by Open Letter Books.  They are Attila by Aliocha Coll (1991) and Attila by Javier Serena (2014), both translated by Katie Whittemore.  Coll’s Attila is a Finnegans Wake-inspired semi-comprehensible dream novel about, at a surface level, the son of Attila the Hun who is a royal hostage of the Roman Empire, and how his loyalty is divided between Rome and the Huns.  Serena’s Attila is a “much more conventional work of fiction” (132) about an author named Alioscha Coll (note spelling) who lives in humiliating filth and poverty in Paris while devoting his life to his incomprehensible novel Attila.  A study of creativity, let’s say, a sad one since the fictional Coll, like the real one, kills himself just after completing his novel. Whittemore had translated a later Serena novel and wanted to do this one, and succumbed to the publisher’s pressure to translate the Coll as well without knowing what she was getting into.  She fears “that I don’t really get it” (18) and suggests that she has botched the job, completing it only with the help of her medium.  “My own sanity rests on simply getting the book done” (18).  I have never seen a translator’s introduction like this.  I take it as fiction, mostly, another paratext like Serena’s novel, similarly, or more, insightful.  Serena also writes that he does not understand Coll’s book. Attila (Coll) sometimes looks like this (144): But mostly does not, and much of the difficulty of the novel is not with lines like the last ten on that page but the “wormless drupes” in the second line, “drupe” being a technical term from botany.  Even with a cognate in Spanish (“drupa”) it is the kind of word the translator has to look up, as did I.  Coll loves technical words from architecture, math, and various sciences.  Archaic words, too. Comploring . . . not compluviating . . . the lamenting of those two lovers . . . the . . . roof of their heartbreak removed. (106, all those dots in the original) The pairing of two similar sounding but otherwise unrelated words is like Finnegans Wake (“complore” is on p. 557 of Wake for what that is worth).  What is utterly unlike Joyce’s novel is the explanation, immediately following, of how Coll imaginatively connects the words.  To “complore” is to weep together, “compluviate” is a style of ancient Roman roof, and if the “roof of their heartbreak” is not exactly a natural metaphor it is immediately comprehensible. “. . . You won’t find it . . . there are as many missing words as excess ones, and all the words you know are excess . . .” (105, ellipses in original) A long chunk of Attila, Chapter III, a full quarter of the novel, is even straightforward, establishing characters, settings, a plot, and the usual novelistic stuff.  The protagonist, Attila’s son, is named Quixote, and he soon sets on a hallucinatory dream journey with caves and deserts and a kind of dialectical chorus that includes the Queen of Sheba and Laocöon.  Much of the action is dialectical.  There is a lot of argument.  But the author took his penname from the dialectical Dostoevsky, from Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, so what did I expect.  Characters double and redouble in the cave and the desert, allowing more argument. Thalia replied with clusters of bunched words, whose only axis seemed to be that smile which did not leave her mouth while she spoke but, on the contrary, continued to unfurl. (116) Why am I trying to summarize the novel when Andrei the Untranslated did such a good job, and he read it in Spanish.  I will just point to what I think is the novel’s essence: “Don’t be content with what Attila tells you, for you still confuse inexpression and lack of communication, your senses are like dried beans in the roomy pod of your consciousness, tiny clappers of an immense bell, irreclaimable symbols in the allegory, lost identities in the imperceptible aura.”  (233) To be clear, inexpression is bad but lack of communication is not, is perhaps even good.  “One must always write as if one could not write” (178).  Coll looks to me as if he is one of those writers who is trying to look behind the veil, to break out of Plato’s cave.  He thinks it can be done by manipulating words.  “Maximal words striving to breach an angel” (203).  I do not think it can, but many of my favorite writers have tried, and I hope many keep trying. Serena insists his Coll is fictional, which I believe, although as a consequence I kept wondering about other possible versions of Coll, aside from the difficult anti-social sex pest Serena portrays, especially since Serena has so little insight into Coll’s novel.  I did recognize one insight, a real Spanish one: But at least it would be a worthy death, he said, as if Alioscha were fighting against some vague dictator, torch in hand. (53) Even an apolitical, self-exiled Spanish writer in the late 1980s had at least absorbed the metaphor of art as resistance to fascism: “He was the same with writing as he might have been with a pair of combat boots and a machine gun in the jungle.” (52) There is an interesting part of Serena’s Attila where Coll gets a Spanish publisher interested in a translation, which everyone thinks is brilliant, of an English play.  There is some joke here I do not understand: … he also included a few pages of a translation he had done of Henry VIII by Christopher Marlowe, whom he claimed to feel much closer to than any other novelist of his age. (71) If someone could explain the joke – why this play, this playwright, this misattribution – I would appreciate it. I recommend Serena’s Attila to readers who like short, easy books about difficult writers and Coll’s Attila to readers who like to look up words (Whittemore already did the hard work).