Thread by @AmericanGwyn

1/ MY FINNEGANS WAKE EXPERIENCE:

When I was thirteen, my Mom moved back to my hometown—or the town I lived closest to—and started dating a guy named Ronnie Phelps.

Ronnie was a wild dude. He was ABD in Literature from the University of Oklahoma.

2/ He was teaching composition at OU as a lecturer while finishing his Joyce dissertation when he walked into his Comp class one day, disrobed, and taught the entire class naked.

He was fired immediately, of course, and ended up in this old ranch house on his parents’ property.

3/ The incident was in the early 70s. He told me he did this in protest of the Vietnam War, but my mother thought he’d suffered a nervous breakdown.

He was brilliant & strange & a lot of fun to talk to. He’d read everything. And he was adapting FINNEGANS WAKE as a screenplay.

4/ He didn’t have the rights, of course. He didn’t even have s JOB. But he was writing this Wake screenplay.

I’d never heard of FW or James Joyce (or much of anything). But I’d listen to Ronnie talk about FW and think, “Oh, this must be the great book ever.”

5/ When I started college in 1990 and found out I could write a little, I got interested in Joyce. When I was 21, a professor friend named Robert Hill agreed to read ULYSSES with me over the summer: he’d been Tom Staley’s student at University of Tulsa when it was Joyce U.

6/ So, I read ULYSSES for the first time in the summer of 1994. Then read it again that fall in a Joyce seminar taught by John Yozzo (who’d also been at student of Tom Staley at TU). It nearly killed me, but I worked hard and really got a handle on it. Or felt like I did.

7/ In the summer of 1996, on my way to grad school, I decided to read FINNEGANS WAKE. I went to Ronnie and he gave me his copy of Joseph Campbell’s SKELETON KEY (autographed by Campbell, btw).

I read ten pages of FW a day every single day.

8/ I wrote down when I started & finished. Looks like I read the novel twice that first year, using Campbell, then I read it three more times the next year using Tindall’s A READER’S GUIDE TO FINNEGANS WAKE.

I understood almost nothing. Whenever I felt like I got some nugget…

9/ I latched onto it like it was gospel.

Then I took Ed Walkiewicz’s ULYSSES seminar at OSU in ‘97 and the two of us began to talk about FW. He convinced me that Campbell’s KEY (& all other “keys”) was/were pointless.

He argued there was no lock and no puzzle. He convinced me.

10/ So, that’s how I found my way to Roland McHugh’s ANNOTATIONS TO FINNEGANS WAKE and his SIGLA book. When I did my next reread of the Wake, I did one page a day with McHugh’s ANNOTATIONS.

Then, I started Xeroxing copies of both books to make my own “facing-page edition.”

11/ I had actual BINDERS of this stuff, binder after binder of Wake/McHugh. I was like an astronomer looking for a star he couldn’t prove the existence of but still believed in.

This is when I got a copy of Ronnie Phelps’ screenplay—or the first 50 pages, at least.

12/ Ronnie had always told me that FW wasn’t a novel, but a religion. He believed that his screenplay—which called for a 24-hour movie—would be the translation of Joyce’s gospel.

I was in my early 20s and dumb enough to believe all this.

I’m still dumb, but less trusting.

13/ So, I get my hands on the first 50 pages of this Wake screenplay.

And it’s TERRIBLE. Just ridiculous and bad in every way something can be.

And several things became clear to me:

1. Ronnie had a substantial drinking problem.

2. There was never going to be a FW movie.

14/

3. I DIDN’T EVEN LIKE FINNEGANS WAKE! It’s a massive pain in the ass. It’s Wordle in 70 different languages without the dopamine hit.

So, I went into Finnegans Wake Anonymous & I didn’t touch it until last year after I broke my back and was recovering from spinal surgery.

15/ I reread various passages, thumbed through McHugh, and all I could think about was the pain and poverty and sadness of Joyce’s life: all the eye operations and physical suffering. The alcoholism, the untreated syphilis, the constant money-seeking and white wine spritzers.

16/ It hit me that writing is a technology that allows humans to escape the constraints of their bodies. Maybe it was because my own body was broken and I was looking for a file and saw myself. But the Wake made a lot of sense to me as an escape attempt.

17/ Joyce managed to make his life bearable for those nineteen miserable years he lived after writing that masterpiece about an Irish ad salesman (who’s just trying to keep his mind off his own body of troubles).

I guess, for a while, Ronnie did that too.