A Word in Your Ear: How & Why to Read James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (by Eric Rosenbloom)

I'm getting really into reading Finnegans Wake; the more I read it, the more I am interested in understanding it. (My finest moment was the other night, when I translated an entire incomprehensible sentence about "esoupcans" without using any sources at all. I don't have the sentence in front of me, but once I connected "esoupcans" with "europeans," the sentence made sense to me. It was sexy.)

Anyway I've been looking up books that help illuminate the text and in my search, I ended up reading the first edition of this book, which I found as a PDF online. It is uneven and lacks a certain academic rigor; on the other hand, it has many worthwhile tidbits worth noting for posterity. I will now note some of them:

• On the idea that Finnegans Wake is a dream: the opening word of the novel, "riverrun," suggests the French "reverons," meaning, "we will dream." Cool, huh?
  
• "explications of Finnegans Wake are often more arcane than the text itself" (true, very true)
  
• There is a critical theory that ALP is in reality a widow of a man executed after the 1916 Easter uprising. The hanging scaffold is the scaffold Tim Finnegan is building. (I don't think the book has an easy solution like this, or that it can be solved, even, but it's interesting.)
  
• Phoenix Park (the site of HCE's crime, of Humpty Dumpty's wall, and of Finnegans scaffold) is Eden, "where the fall into knowledge is enacted nightly."
  
• "The challenge of reading is not to see through the veil of printed words to something hidden but to transubstantiate them as symbols back to originating thought." Oooh. Deep.
  

I loved the author's symbol language that shows how characters morph from one into the other. He also connected each of the characters to characters in the myth of Osiris and in the Tristan and Isolde story (not an original theory by any means but an extremely illuminating one, and in this case, explained particularly well). Also includes "the shorter Finnegans Wake" (about ten sentences long, available online and charming) and various guides to reading.

Did this book blow my mind? Not really. But it offered more pieces to the puzzle. I can't imagine why anyone would want to follow in my footsteps at this point, but Finnegans Wake? Is really, really fun to try and figure out. Especially once you realize that Joyce isn't being random at all; that it all fits together; it all makes sense in a really frustrating, cool, brilliant way.

(And I've just realized that once I finish this book I am in danger of name dropping it in every conversation I ever have about literature, only I will refer to it as "the Wake" and be really pretentious and annoying. Crap.)