Too Much Information: Butt and Taff Lost in the Fog of War
Before we take a closer look at the first four paragraphs of Finnegans Wake, I would like to say a few words about making sense of Joyce’s puzzling text. There are two approaches one can take: the minimalist approach and the maximalist approach. If you are anxious to be getting on, you could try to survive on the barest minimum of understanding, just enough to stave off total incomprehension. Or you could take your time and squeeze every last drop of meaning out of every word. The ideal approach probably lies somewhere between these two extremes.
To illustrate how overwhelming the maximalist approach can be, take a look at the glosses for the opening word of the book, riverrun, on the FinnegansWiki website, where everything and anything goes:
Genesis 2:10: And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.
Revelation 22:1: And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment, Lines 1-4:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
—With a possible hint that this word is the Alpha of FW and symbolizes ALP. For Kubla Khan see (FW 32). The allusion to Coleridge’s Kubla Khan leaves enough room for speculations: the poem came to Coleridge during a drug-induced dream—reverie; from author’s note published with the poem: On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved—Erinnerung; At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!—the smooth flow of words is interrupted by thunder, producing chaosmatic world of FW.
Alfred Tennyson, Dying Swan, Lines 5-6:
With an inner voice the river ran,
Adown it floated a dying swan,
And loudly did lament.
Erinnerung: (German) remembrance; memory (i.e. a thing remembered)
Vico, The New Science § 819: ... memory is the same thing as imagination ... the theological poets called Memory the mother of the Muses.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter 5: Freud identifies memories as a principal source of the manifest content of dreams.
River Rhone: river runs from Swiss Alps to the Mediterranean Sea.
River Rhine: cf the connections between FW and Wagner’s operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, which starts with the theft of the gold in Das Rheingold, and ends with the gold being Given! (FW 628.15) back to the Rhinemaidens at the conclusion of Götterdämmerung.
riverain: (adj) pertaining to a river or a riverbank; situated or dwelling on or near a river; (n) a district situated beside a river.
reverie: (n) a state of dreaming while awake, a daydream; a fantastic, visionary, or impractical idea; (music) an instrumental composition of a vague and dreamy character.
reverend: (informal) a member of the clergy.
Reverend: (adj) 1. (initial capital letter) used as a title of respect applied or prefixed to the name of a member of the clergy or a religious order, cf. ALP’s letter (FW 615 ff): Dear. And we go on to Dirtdump. Reverend.; 2. worthy to be revered; entitled to reverence; 3. pertaining to or characteristic of the clergy.
Reverend Jonathan Swift? Gulliver’s Travels was also a Menippean satire of decadence.
err: to make a mistake; to sin; to wander from the right way; to go astray.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! It’s hard to find any better description for Joyce’s art in general and FW in particular.
run: (Old English) mystery, secret; advice, counsel; writing; a rune.
ri- (Italian) Prefix used with verbal roots to mean repetition; re-, again.
ricorso: (Italian) return—Vico’s ricorso storico (historical return).
riverranno: (Italian) they will return; they will come back.
riveran: (Italian Dialect) they will arrive.
riverain: (French) inhabitant.
reverons: (French) let us dream.
reveries: (French) day-dreams, reveries; ravings, delusions.
reverrons: (French) let us see again.
reverence: (French) curtsey.
rief heran: (German) he or she called or summoned somebody.
Ragnarok: (Old Norse) fate of the gods; twilight of the gods; end of the world.
liv amhrán: (L/R split) Liv (Titus Livius, Vico’s first-loved historian; Anna Livia Plurabelle; Lucia Joyce) + Irish song.
Rivalin: (L/R split) Tristram’s father.
water faucet: is there a washhand basin with a tap in the corner of HCE’s bedroom?—the 1st of 7 elements in a circuit of HCE’s bedroom.
watercourse: the Latinism-Saxonism of river-run becomes the Saxonism-Latinism of water-course.
riverrun: Eridanos.
Nonnus of Panopolis, Dionysiaca 23: I will drag down from heaven the fiery Eridanos whose course is among the stars, and bring him back to a new home in the Celtic land: he shall be water again, and the sky shall be bare of the river of fire.
River Jordan: a river in the Holy Land—Giordano Bruno, whose name means literally Brown Jordan—the River Liffey (FW 194.22 turfbrown mummy)—the Liffey as Dublin’s sewer—jordan = a chamber-pot. Giordano wrote mnemonic works (see Erinnerung above ).
elvelop: (Norwegian) the course of the river, translates directly as riverrun (river - elv; run - lop (noun or imperative)).
rivo: (Latin) (v) from rivus (brook; channel): I lead or I draw off.
ribhéar a rúin: (Irish) my darling river.
rún: (Irish) a riddle, a mystery.
Phew! One word down: only 215,533 to go. Clearly this is not the best way to explore the text—especially if you are a first-time reader. Some of these glosses are doubtful, some are of peripheral significance, some are of no assistance to the first-time reader, and some won’t make much sense to the reader until he or she has read the book through at least once.
Annotations
to Finnegans Wake
At the other end of the scale is Roland McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake. In the latest edition—the fourth (2016)—of this classic, we are given the following gloss for riverrun:
river run: an excursion on a river ... Ital Dial riveran: they will arrive (McHugh 2016:3)
And that’s it. In the third edition (2006), McHugh glossed riverrun as follows:
riverain: pertaining to a river ... Ital Dial riveran: they will arrive (McHugh 2006:3)
I have long since disposed of my copies of the first (1980) and second (1991) editions of the Annotations, but I vaguely recall riverrun being glossed in the first edition as the German Erinnerung (a memory). Why the changes?
FWEET
Raphael Slepon steers a middle course between these two extremes, which is probably why his website, FWEET, is so popular with Wakean explorers. Here is his commentary on riverrun:
Motif: The Letter: Revered (letter start) [628.16]
running river
Coleridge: other works: Kubla Khan 1: “In Xanadu... Where Alph, the sacred river, ran”
Italian riverranno: (they) will come again
French rêverons: (we) will dream
French reverrons: (we) will see again, (we) will meet again
German Erinnerung: memory [628.14]
This is probably the depth of exploration required of the first-time reader of Finnegans Wake.
But whichever route you take, you must still be prepared for some measure of disappointment. Recently I came across the following short review of McHugh’s Annotations on the website LibraryThing:
occasionally helpful, but like most annotations it answers questions I don’t care about and mostly fails to explain much that confuses me
My experience has been similar. The first-time reader of Finnegans Wake should be primarily concerned with the big picture: What is it all about? What is happening right now? Most glosses and annotations, however, are concerned with the details. And sometimes one’s incomprehension is so intractable that no amount of annotating seems to erode it. You are simply left with too much information. This is one of the many frustrating things about Finnegans Wake that one just has to put up with.
This is why I believe the first-time reader should not be overly concerned with the details. Accept that there is much that will pass you by and leave you wondering: What the hell was that about? Instead, try to discern Joyce’s broad brushstrokes. If you can latch onto the gist of a passage, you are doing well. You can always come back and explore the details later.
This is the approach I will be taking in this series.
And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.
References
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939, 1949)
James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, First Edition, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore (1980)
Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, Fourth Edition, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore (2016)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
Image Credits
Too Much Information: © Danis Rose, Fair Use
Annotations to Finnegans Wake: © The John Hopkins University Press, Fair Use
FWEET: © Raphael Slepon, Fair Use
Useful Resources
The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection
The James Joyce Digital Archive
From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay
John Gordon’s Finnegans Wake Blog
No comments:
Post a Comment