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A review by lupetuple
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
5.0
Where to begin with this book… anywhere, really. You can flip to any page and find entire worlds, funny and tragic, in every one. Xenophobic and orientalist imaginaries, hinged on the perceived right to conquest, through means of war and sexual violence, often inextricably linked and supporting the other—all of this abound with clever wordplay, damning Freudian slips, and an irresistible musicality, rhythm, that requires reading aloud. There is something new with every return, something that escaped the mind’s grasp but with fresh eyes, becomes inescapable, compelling, significant, a Eureka moment at every turn.
The specter of family legacy, reputation, the judgment of all the world looms throughout the novel, where privacy ceases to exist and identity is desperately constructed, destroyed, and reconstructed endlessly. Ideas of authenticity, words given a kind of “power” through text and specifically the printed word, the meaninglessness of language captured well through its apparent nonsense and unintelligibility, compensated for by languages made bastards and only understood contextually or by association with sounds. It’s hard to describe the experience of reading and deciphering The Wake; it’s a personal experience that, as the introduction alludes to, is malleable and unique.
The final pages brought me to tears, as ALP’s point of view is given its due, only to end up serving as the vehicle for HCE’s narrative, continued in the first pages of the book. “I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You’re a bumpkin,” she says. “You're but a puny.” To read such lamentations, from a woman essentially chained to her husband’s reputation, meanwhile she engages in similar behavior if only to exert an agency over prying eyes which will always cast a damning judgment onto her, and her entire family besides—only for it to circle back to HCE, gave a sense of defeat, to the relentless patriarchal conquest of HCE. Here Comes Everybody: all the world is a witness, and everyone, in a way, is HCE: desperate to control their image in the eyes of others, preoccupied with denial, with exaggeration, with myth, to ease an inner insecurity only ameliorated with a need and impulse to dominate others.
That birds figure so frequently, hovering above waters, the waters of ALP, invoked as a river, through which HCE and the narrative run… perhaps HCE thinks himself a bird of flight, as he is always juxtaposed with egg imagery, the ever lovable Humpty Dumpty, doomed to fall and break and be known throughout the ages only as a fall from high. He hovers above ALP, and imagines birds having dominion of sky, over the sea… yet they must land sometime. The ocean is vast and unknowable, bodies of water, and HCE regards ALP with this kind of idolization, this dehumanization.
So many recurring images, myths, and convoluted tales of conquest, all captured in a disorienting dream language, endow this book with so much significance to me, so many possibilities and hints I want to chase. It is an actual adventure to read The Wake: it’s a comedy, a drama, a scientific study, a puzzle, an equation… it’s so many things, and nothing at the same time. Definitely one of the most ambitious works I’ve read in my life, and deserves its new place as one of my favorite literary works of all time.
The specter of family legacy, reputation, the judgment of all the world looms throughout the novel, where privacy ceases to exist and identity is desperately constructed, destroyed, and reconstructed endlessly. Ideas of authenticity, words given a kind of “power” through text and specifically the printed word, the meaninglessness of language captured well through its apparent nonsense and unintelligibility, compensated for by languages made bastards and only understood contextually or by association with sounds. It’s hard to describe the experience of reading and deciphering The Wake; it’s a personal experience that, as the introduction alludes to, is malleable and unique.
The final pages brought me to tears, as ALP’s point of view is given its due, only to end up serving as the vehicle for HCE’s narrative, continued in the first pages of the book. “I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You’re a bumpkin,” she says. “You're but a puny.” To read such lamentations, from a woman essentially chained to her husband’s reputation, meanwhile she engages in similar behavior if only to exert an agency over prying eyes which will always cast a damning judgment onto her, and her entire family besides—only for it to circle back to HCE, gave a sense of defeat, to the relentless patriarchal conquest of HCE. Here Comes Everybody: all the world is a witness, and everyone, in a way, is HCE: desperate to control their image in the eyes of others, preoccupied with denial, with exaggeration, with myth, to ease an inner insecurity only ameliorated with a need and impulse to dominate others.
That birds figure so frequently, hovering above waters, the waters of ALP, invoked as a river, through which HCE and the narrative run… perhaps HCE thinks himself a bird of flight, as he is always juxtaposed with egg imagery, the ever lovable Humpty Dumpty, doomed to fall and break and be known throughout the ages only as a fall from high. He hovers above ALP, and imagines birds having dominion of sky, over the sea… yet they must land sometime. The ocean is vast and unknowable, bodies of water, and HCE regards ALP with this kind of idolization, this dehumanization.
So many recurring images, myths, and convoluted tales of conquest, all captured in a disorienting dream language, endow this book with so much significance to me, so many possibilities and hints I want to chase. It is an actual adventure to read The Wake: it’s a comedy, a drama, a scientific study, a puzzle, an equation… it’s so many things, and nothing at the same time. Definitely one of the most ambitious works I’ve read in my life, and deserves its new place as one of my favorite literary works of all time.