The First Four Paragraphs

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One of the earliest attempts to make Finnegans Wake intelligible to the common reader was A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, which was published in 1944, just five years after Joyce’s monster made its first appearance in print. These two pioneers of Wakean scholarship had already realized that the first four paragraphs of Finnegans Wake were as much an introduction to the book as a whole as was the opening chapter itself:

The first four paragraphs are the suspended tick of time between a cycle just past and one about to begin. They are in effect an overture, resonant with all the elements of Finnegans Wake ... The first page and a half of Finnegans Wake hold in suspension the seed energies of all the characters and plot motifs of the book. (Campbell & Robinson 15 ... 24)

Joseph Campbell

As a demonstration of how one should go about the task of unlocking Joyce’s text, they began their study of Finnegans Wake by devoting twelve pages of the Skeleton Key to an analysis of these four paragraphs alone. If they had continued at that pace, their book would have exceeded 5000 pages.

Campbell and Robinson’s approach to Finnegans Wake is an example of what Roland McHugh once called disparagingly naïve realism (McHugh 50): Finnegans Wake is essentially a traditional English novel with characters, a story and a plot : only its narrative style is revolutionary. Joyce found an entirely new way of telling his story, but that story is one that he could just as easily have told in the traditional wideawake manner.

In the language of modern cryptography, Finnegans Wake is a ciphertext, and the Skeleton Key is the secret key that will decrypt it and recover the plaintext.

I agree with McHugh that this is not the way to approach Finnegans Wake. Nevertheless, Campbell and Robinson’s Skeleton Key is full of profound insights into Joyce’s text. Even if you do not agree with their analysis in the large, reading that analysis will leave you with a tidy bushel of golden nuggets that will prove invaluable in your own analysis.

A new edition of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake was published in 2005, edited and with an introduction by the legendary Joycean scholar Edmund L Epstein. For all its flaws, it is an instrument worth having in your Wakean tool chest. Epstein’s more recent A Guide through Finnegans Wake is also well worth adding to the tool chest.

Waywords and Meansigns

RFW 003.01 – 004.08

Let’s hear those first four paragraphs. In The Restored Finnegans Wake they comprise RFW 003.01–004.08 (Page 3, Line 1 through Page 4, Line 8). In earlier editions the pagination is FW 003.01–004.17.

Several recordings of Finnegans Wake are now available online, a few under the Creative Commons License. There may be some slight discrepancies between these recordings. Different people will pronounce Joyce’s neologisms differently, and some mistakes are unavoidable in the exceptional circumstances. Mispronouncing Howth [ryhmes with oath] is a common rookie mistake, but who is to say what the correct pronunciation of vicus might be? And without at least a few words of Irish, you will not recognize mishe mishe for what it is—which may lead you to mispronounce it. And let’s not get started on those thunderwords!

There is also the question of which edition of Finnegans Wake to use. The Restored Finnegans Wake is now my preferred reading text but it is still in copyright. Most of Rose & O’Hanlon’s 9000 or so emendations are visible to the reader but inaudible to the listener. I mainly use it because it corrects the more egregious errors of earlier editions (where sometimes entire lines of text have been omitted or misplaced). However, several of the editors’ emendations I am inclined to reject—for reasons I will give at the appropriate time.

Most online recordings follow one of the earlier editions, which are in the public domain. Let’s listen to a few of them.

Mr Smolin and Double Naught Spy Car

This recording is taken from the second edition of the Waywords & Meansigns project to record the entire text of Finnegans Wake set to original music. The reader, Barry Smolin, mispronounces Howth, but otherwise his delivery is largely flawless. The relevant part of the recording begins at 0:00:00 and ends at 0:04:51:

Mr Smolin and Double Naught Spy Car

Mariana Lanari & Sjoerd Leijten

This recording is taken from the first edition of the Waywords & Meansigns project. The music is a little overpowering and Joyce’s text is sometimes invaded by extraneous lyrics, but I like it. Like Smolin, Mariana Lanari mispronounces Howth, but overall her and Sjoerd Leijten’s interpretation is engaging. The relevant part of the recording begins at 0:00:00 and ends around 0:05:10:

Mariana Lanari and Sjoerd Leijten

Patrick Horgan

As we saw in an earlier article, Patrick Horgan’s 1985 reading was groundbreaking, being the world’s first unabridged recording of Finnegans Wake. The online recording is, unfortunately, quite hissy. I used Audacity to clean it up a bit so that I could listen to it on my laptop, but the result was still far from perfect. There are only so many times you can apply Noise Removal without distorting the voice. This is, by the way, a mono recording.

Horgan reads fairly quickly but as one would expect from a professional actor, his delivery is clear and he brings the text to life. Inexplicably, though, he omits half the opening paragraph! Hardly an auspicious start to such a lengthy project, but this, it seems, is an editing error. The original recording, which is linked to at the bottom of this page, is flawless. So I recommend using this recording. The relevant part of the recording begins at 2:45 and ends at 5:37:

Patrick Horgan

The Most Ever Company

This is the only online recording I found with an Irish reader. I don’t know who he is—The Most Ever Company is a semianonymous art collective in Oklahoma ... We believe in the Theory of Obscurity—but even he mispronounces Howth.

Clear all so! ’Tis a culchie. (Cf RFW 013.11)

His enthusiasm is fetching, though, and if the comments and thumbs-up are anything to go by, it’s a memorable reading. The relevant part of the recording begins at 0:00 and ends at 3:05:

The Most Ever Company

I have said before that the key to understanding Finnegans Wake is familiarity with the text. Repeated listening to these online recordings will go a long way towards achieving that goal.

The Bookworm

A Forceps Case

I have also said before that the correct way to approach Finnegans Wake is on two fronts: reading and interpreting. These two prongs should be kept separate. When you are reading, keep reading. Don’t be stopping every few words to try and figure out what you have just read. Just keep going and let the text take hold of you, even if you have no idea what it means. Later, you can get out your glosses and dictionaries and go through the passage again with a fine-tooth comb, teasing out its meaning. Your eyes will eventually become adapted to the dark.

And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.

References

Joseph Campbell, Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Harcourt, brace and Company, New York (1944)
Edmund L Epstein, A Guide through Finnegans Wake, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, Florida (2009)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939, 1949)
James Joyce, Stuart Gilbert (editor) & Richard Ellmann (editor), The Letters of James Joyce, Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Viking Press, New York
James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
Roland McHugh, The Finnegans Wake Experience, University of California Press, Berkeley (1981)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)

Audio Credits

Barry Smolin and Double Naught Spy Car: © Barry Smolin and Double Naught Spy Car, Waywords and Meansigns, Second Edition, Creative Commons License
Mariana Lanari & Sjoerd Leijten: © Mariana Lanari & Sjoerd Leijten, Waywords and Meansigns, First Edition, Creative Commons License
Patrick Horgan: Property of the U. S. Government, Fair Use

Video Credits

The Most Ever Company: Standard YouTube License, Fair Use

Image Credits

The Bookworm: Carl Spitzweg (artist), Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt, Bavaria, Public Domain

Finnegans Wake - A Prescriptive Guide

10 July 2022