Thread by @mykola

Also: no neurotypical person in history could have written Finnegans Wake, it's just not even conceivable.

https://twitter.com/mykola/status/1412778840523431937

Do you know about the Wake, as its known among its scholars?

The book begins in the middle of a sentence: "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."

The book ends in the middle of a sentence. Are they the same sentence? Yes and no. The book is about loops, iterations, archetypes, shapes. It's the story of a family, but they're not really explicitly described. They show up in dreams, as anagrams, as snatches of character.

There's Finn, Again: Humphrey Chimpdon Earwicker, the father of this family, the patriarch, standing in for Irish folk hero Finn MacCool. "HCE", as he's known, shows up in the text when tradition matters, when crime takes place, when shame and fallen human nature arise.

There's Anna Livia Plurabella, his wife. She's a river to his stone, a dynamic ocean to his city. She represents change and grace and sacrifice, like women do to Joyce. She shows up as "ALP" throughout the text.

(HCE and ALP are all over the text, but rarely explicitly. Go back to that first sentence of the text I shared - you'll find HCE waiting for you.)

HCE and ALP have three children. There's Shaun the Postman -- blonde haired blue eyed favored son, he obeys and tries to be good. There's Shem, his brother, who is a writer. One creates, one transmits. The creator is associated with Sin, the transmitter with Blandness.

They have a sister, Isabel - they also, sometimes, merge into another character called Tristan, with whom Isabel is in love. Isabel and Tristan might go on to become HCE and ALP in the next cycle? It's not entirely clear.

So what is this book ABOUT? Listen, bud, it's not that simple. This book isn't even written in English. Or rather, it's written in English but contains sentences, puns, jokes and expressions from dozens of other languages as well. Why?

Because Joyce wanted to write a book that no one person could read. The ideal reader for Finnegans Wake is intimately familiar with everything from Irish history to Catholic apocrypha; they speak English as easily as they speak Swahili; they are fully up on world lit.

Finnegans Wake as a text isn't something you pick up and just read. You can't. Your brain can't do it, and that's intentional.

This is a book to be read out loud in a group that's as diverse as humanly possible, because everyone adds to the interpretations.

So, what's the plot? Heh.

A family runs a tavern. They all help out. At closing time they clean up and go to bed.

One way to interpret this book is, it's their dreams.

Another way is to say, this book is about the archetypal human experiences ranging from love to betrayal.

It's not a book you ever finish, because there are always going to be more jokes, more comments, more metaphors that you just didn't get at all. How could you, you're not trained in 18th century medicine nor do you know anything about 1920s American baseball!

My old English professor who taught me this text, Sebastian Knowles at the Ohio State University, came up with radically interesting ways to interpret different chapters. One chapter we read collectively as a baseball game, where footnotes on the left and right were runs etc.

(friends it WORKED, we were able to keep track of the score throughout the chapter and see references to it as we went. I have NO idea how my professor identified this modality, even less of an idea if Joyce possibly intended it -- but it WORKED, that's the thing!)

When I encountered this text it fundamentally changed me. More than any other book I've ever read, more even than Gnomon, Finnegans Wake is a living being that wants to have a deep conversation with you. It's incredible and impossible.

Gosh, writing this thread has me missing this book. Maybe I should do an online reading group...?

(I don't mean to short-change the plot question. In addition to being about a family running a tavern it's about the ontology of the universe; about the universality of human suffering; about the trauma of existing as your authentic self; it's a history of the world.)

Also: reading Finnegans Wake teaches you about the Death of the Author, about the limits (and value!) of authorial intent, about the way readers construct the story of the book as they read it as much as the author constructs it by writing it.

These are really important ideas!

If you'd like to read the wake, I strongly recommend getting some ancillary texts or using an annotated and hyperlinked version like this one: finwake.com/1024chapter1/f……

This book was written as hypertext decades before hypertext was invented.