Reading Finnegans Wake on the Toilet

Don't say you don't have time

Despite having kept a copy of it nearby throughout the majority of my adult life, I’ve never read Finnegans Wake from cover to cover. During my late 20s, it became a bedside monument, an object intended to help me slip over into sleep, which should also explain my extreme insomnia during that period.

More so than a sedative then, perhaps it should be better employed as an idling engine without wheels, similar to a stumbling block for the not yet bedridden, designed to keep the brain awake whether it recognizes it or not. This theory fits with the general idea that FW represents the night-side of Ulysses day, though it also fails to relate what an experience of actually actively reading FW with any intent of comprehending it might look like.

I use ‘comprehending’ loosely here, as clearly this is not a tome that valorizes repurposing its component parts outside its own closed system with any intentional utility—that is to say, the novel is inarguably opaque on purpose, though not to say that it is mere word salad, or even useless for lack of handles. In fact, now that I’m older and less worried than ever about how long one should spend on any one habit without falling behind the pack, I find myself returning to FW with an entirely different approach in mind.

I’m less interested now in ‘letting the text wash over me,’ as I might have described such a pursuit without a clear endgame but to have absorbed it and moved on, and more interested in how with age, reading FW feels less insane and obscure for all the right reasons, and more so like what it has sometimes been billed as among extremist fans: the future of a new literature, founded on rules that refuse to be digested properly even in exegesis, which in turn make it more a magical document than a torture device. Not that there’s anything wrong with either, though most detractors—or even smart people who simply don’t have time to read what seems to refuse them—have had pretty much an open and shut case arguing against the validity of Joyce’s magnum opus as a benchmark for anything else besides its own self.

How could any novel serve as the future of literature when it dissuades by dint the vast majority of contemporary readers by foreboding alone? Is there really a waiting public hundreds of years from now who will look back on FW as a true horizon rather than a boobytrap, and if so, what is wrong with us now that we can’t quite catch up? Is it simply petty handwringing to claim there’s something more yet to be mined from what seems to read like gibberish, and if so, then why does every attempt to relate to it seem to require infinite patience, even a will for shit-eating?