Some of the difficulties of Finnegans Wake - Two dreamyums in one dromium? Yes and no error.

I am too tired to write about Finnegans Wake which is a good state for writing about this dream novel where characters keep falling asleep.  “Dream” is conventional wisdom but I will note that no part of the book resembles any dream I have ever experienced or read about, although I am willing to believe that James Joyce’s dreams were mostly massive blocks of multilingual puns.

A dream of favours, a favourable dream.  They know how they believe that they believe that they know.  Wherefore they wail.  (470)

Who is the dreamer, Alice or the Red King, or both?  Both, at the very least both.

Two dreamyums in one dromium?  Yes and no error.  And both as like as a duel of lentils?  Peacisely.  (89)

Imagine the puns Joyce did not include.

I accept the dream but reject the idea that since Ulysses is a day then Finnegans Wake is a night.  Ulysses is also a night.  A “day” includes a period of time called “night.”  Did these people not read the “Nighttown” chapter of Ulysses?

Establishing time is actually not so high on the list of the difficulties of Finnegans Wake.  Joyce minimizes and disperses the usual novelistic clues about setting, situation, and narrators.  I am used to being patient about these things, but hoo boy.  In the first chapter, for example, which I am pretty sure is in a Dublin pub where mourners are drinking and drinkers are mourning the death of “freeman’s maurer” (6, bricklayer, wall builder) Finnegan, the speaker could plausibly be one extremely voluble drunk or a multitude of voices.  No idea.

The action is so obscure that plot summary is speculation.  The plot exists on multiple levels, and I had trouble establishing myself in one.  I was most comfortable at the mythic level, where characters are hills and rivers or gods enacting a cycle of “the commodius vicus of recirculation” (3).  The domestic, Dublin level, which in some ways is the most ordinarily novel-like, was extremely difficult, difficult just to figure out what the heck is supposed to be happening on any given page.  I do have an idea about what HCE did in the park that led to the gossip about him.  I guess that is the domestic plot?

The great shift Joyce makes takes that almost moves the book out of the genre of the novel is that the characters are barely characters.  They have symbolic and allegorical functions often of real richness, but do not have personalities.  They are not people.  Ulysses for all of its fuss and fireworks, is full of people, one of whom is among the greats of fiction.  In the usual, and some unusual, novelistic ways, I know Leopold Bloom, which is not true of any of the Finnegans Wake puppets.

This is a complaint.  It is a shame to see a master artist give up something he is so good at, whatever else he might be doing.

There is a near exception that has a parallel in Molly Bloom's chapter in Ulysses.  The dipper into Finnegans Wake will surely read the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” chapter, I.8, with the two riverside washwomen who turn into a stone and a tree while discussing the novel’s principle female figure.  In the last nine pages, in a single paragraph, Anna for the first time (??? – everything I say about this book should be buried in question marks) speaks or dreams in her own voice, a passage of unusual poetic beauty.  On the last page Anna is turning into a river but also falling asleep:

My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I'll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair!

This is the ending from The Tempest, from One Hundred Years of Solitude and Little, Big, the ending where we come to the last page of the book.  That “toy fair” was once said to Joyce by his infant son.  Joyce is rarely adorable.

Then we get the last reference to Humpty Dumpty, mirroring the one on the first page, then the gulls and “Finn, again!” and we are ready to turn back to the first page perhaps after a good night's sleep.

Tomorrow I will poke around the remains of Humpty Dumpty.

The key to Finnegans Wake - there is a limit to all things so this will never do

Over the last month I read Finnegans Wake (1939).  I first read some bits of it in college, in a Norton Anthology of British Literature, and other, although mostly the same, bits occasionally, mostly to remind myself what they looked like.  Anyone interested in literature should sometime read a few pages just to see what it looks like.  Last year I became curious about how readers saw Joyce’s text while it was appearing in various magazines as Work in Progress.  Did I miss the book that collects and discusses these first pieces?  Enough are in the public domain now to make an interesting book.  Admittedly at some point the map becomes the territory, and printing all of Work in Progress is just publishing Finnegans Wake in a screwy order.

Speaking of which, this is going to be a true ramble.  I read without a key or a guide, although I certainly looked up plenty of things.  Finnegans Wake is a book for people who like to look things up.  But I mostly just read it, or at least looked at it.  I looked at every word, mostly in order.

Now, kapnimancy and infusionism may both fit as tight as two trivets but while we in our wee free state, holding to that prestatute in our charter, may have our irremovable doubts as to the whole sense of the lot, the interpretation of any phrase in the whole, the meaning of every word of a phrase so far deciphered out of it, however unfettered our Irish daily independence, we must vaunt no idle dubiosity as to its genuine authorship and holusbolus authoritativeness. (117-8)

The bold is mine, a desperate attempt to extract meaning from mishmash but the words are Joyce’s.  He knows how this looks.  And this is, as Finnegans Wake goes, almost a plain old sentence.  I was always amused when a plain old sentence appeared, like:

But the strangest thing happened.  (470)

Or:

All the world loves a big gleaming jelly.  (274)

Or:

That is more than I can fix, for the teom bihan, anyway.  So let I and you now kindly drop that, angryman!  That’s not French pastry.  You can take it from me.  (412)

A genuine key to Finnegans Wake is that much of the text is on one level speech, so hearing it in the voice of your favorite ranting Irishman solves a number of problems; “teom bihan” becomes easy enough.  I used the voice of the great Jinx Lennon (explore widely, but be warned that Jinx is noisy).  It helped to make him drunker and more into wordplay.  Puns, the puns, the endless puns.

Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to be Mister Finnagain!  Comeday morm and, O you’re vine!  Sendday’s eve and, ah, you’re vinegar!  Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you’re going to be fined again!

And this with poor Finnegan stretched out dead right in front of this joker.  Although he does get better.  This passage is a just example of Joyce’s bad habit of working through every combination, which I may complain about more later, but my question here is: Should, and I mean this as an ethical question, should the pun be the fundamental principle of prose writing?

(technologically, let me say, the appetizing entry of this subject on a fool chest of vialds is plumply pudding the carp before doevre hors) (164)

I mean, that is what I call a groaner.  This is the section where Brutus and Cassius assassinate Caesar but have been turned into Butter and Cheese, so there are food puns everywhere.  Multilingual food puns.  Omnilingual everything puns.

Somewhere I remember Anthony Burgess writing that he found a good laugh on every page of Finnegans Wake.  My rate was not so high.  I got a good laugh here:

… and by all means, after a good ground kiss to Terracussa and for wars luck our lefftoff's flung over our home homoplate, cling to it as with drowning hands, hoping against hope all the while that, by the light of philophosy, (and may she never folsage us!) things will begin to clear up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour and be hanged to them as ten to one they will too, please the pigs, as they ought to categorically, as, stricly between ourselves, there is a limit to all things so this will never do.  (119)

I sound like I am complaining.  Yes and no.  Let’s ramble for another couple of days.  I may eventually draw near a point.

Two novels titled Attila - Maximal words striving to breach an angel

I will write about two newly published translations of Spanish novels that comprise an amusing stunt by Open Letter Books.  They are Attila by Aliocha Coll (1991) and Attila by Javier Serena (2014), both translated by Katie Whittemore. 

Coll’s Attila is a Finnegans Wake-inspired semi-comprehensible dream novel about, at a surface level, the son of Attila the Hun who is a royal hostage of the Roman Empire, and how his loyalty is divided between Rome and the Huns.  Serena’s Attila is a “much more conventional work of fiction” (132) about an author named Alioscha Coll (note spelling) who lives in humiliating filth and poverty in Paris while devoting his life to his incomprehensible novel Attila.  A study of creativity, let’s say, a sad one since the fictional Coll, like the real one, kills himself just after completing his novel.

Whittemore had translated a later Serena novel and wanted to do this one, and succumbed to the publisher’s pressure to translate the Coll as well without knowing what she was getting into.  She fears “that I don’t really get it” (18) and suggests that she has botched the job, completing it only with the help of her medium.  “My own sanity rests on simply getting the book done” (18).  I have never seen a translator’s introduction like this.  I take it as fiction, mostly, another paratext like Serena’s novel, similarly, or more, insightful.  Serena also writes that he does not understand Coll’s book.

Attila (Coll) sometimes looks like this (144):

But mostly does not, and much of the difficulty of the novel is not with lines like the last ten on that page but the “wormless drupes” in the second line, “drupe” being a technical term from botany.  Even with a cognate in Spanish (“drupa”) it is the kind of word the translator has to look up, as did I.  Coll loves technical words from architecture, math, and various sciences.  Archaic words, too.

Comploring . . . not compluviating . . . the lamenting of those two lovers . . . the . . . roof of their heartbreak removed. (106, all those dots in the original)

The pairing of two similar sounding but otherwise unrelated words is like Finnegans Wake (“complore” is on p. 557 of Wake for what that is worth).  What is utterly unlike Joyce’s novel is the explanation, immediately following, of how Coll imaginatively connects the words.  To “complore” is to weep together, “compluviate” is a style of ancient Roman roof, and if the “roof of their heartbreak” is not exactly a natural metaphor it is immediately comprehensible.

“. . . You won’t find it . . . there are as many missing words as excess ones, and all the words you know are excess . . .” (105, ellipses in original)

A long chunk of Attila, Chapter III, a full quarter of the novel, is even straightforward, establishing characters, settings, a plot, and the usual novelistic stuff.  The protagonist, Attila’s son, is named Quixote, and he soon sets on a hallucinatory dream journey with caves and deserts and a kind of dialectical chorus that includes the Queen of Sheba and Laocöon.  Much of the action is dialectical.  There is a lot of argument.  But the author took his penname from the dialectical Dostoevsky, from Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, so what did I expect.  Characters double and redouble in the cave and the desert, allowing more argument.

Thalia replied with clusters of bunched words, whose only axis seemed to be that smile which did not leave her mouth while she spoke but, on the contrary, continued to unfurl. (116)

Why am I trying to summarize the novel when Andrei the Untranslated did such a good job, and he read it in Spanish.  I will just point to what I think is the novel’s essence:

“Don’t be content with what Attila tells you, for you still confuse inexpression and lack of communication, your senses are like dried beans in the roomy pod of your consciousness, tiny clappers of an immense bell, irreclaimable symbols in the allegory, lost identities in the imperceptible aura.”  (233)

To be clear, inexpression is bad but lack of communication is not, is perhaps even good.  “One must always write as if one could not write” (178).  Coll looks to me as if he is one of those writers who is trying to look behind the veil, to break out of Plato’s cave.  He thinks it can be done by manipulating words.  “Maximal words striving to breach an angel” (203).  I do not think it can, but many of my favorite writers have tried, and I hope many keep trying.

Serena insists his Coll is fictional, which I believe, although as a consequence I kept wondering about other possible versions of Coll, aside from the difficult anti-social sex pest Serena portrays, especially since Serena has so little insight into Coll’s novel.  I did recognize one insight, a real Spanish one:

But at least it would be a worthy death, he said, as if Alioscha were fighting against some vague dictator, torch in hand. (53)

Even an apolitical, self-exiled Spanish writer in the late 1980s had at least absorbed the metaphor of art as resistance to fascism:

“He was the same with writing as he might have been with a pair of combat boots and a machine gun in the jungle.” (52)

There is an interesting part of Serena’s Attila where Coll gets a Spanish publisher interested in a translation, which everyone thinks is brilliant, of an English play.  There is some joke here I do not understand:

… he also included a few pages of a translation he had done of Henry VIII by Christopher Marlowe, whom he claimed to feel much closer to than any other novelist of his age. (71)

If someone could explain the joke – why this play, this playwright, this misattribution – I would appreciate it.

I recommend Serena’s Attila to readers who like short, easy books about difficult writers and Coll’s Attila to readers who like to look up words (Whittemore already did the hard work).

What I Read in March 2025 – Some day, he thought, I must use such a scene to start a good, thick old-fashioned novel

FICTION

The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904), Arthur Conan Doyle – My emergency book, the book on my phone, for when I need to read in the dark, or it is raining at the bus stop, or similar dire situations.  I have been dipping into it for two years or more, but decided to finish it up.  In the previous collection, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893), I could see Doyle growing bored with his creation to the extent that he shoved him off a cliff, but the stories in this book are rock solid magazine entertainment, every one of them.

A Mirror for Witches (1928), Esther Forbes – How many of us read Johnny Tremain (1943) as a child?  All of us (among the U.S. us)?  This earlier novel is about a lively teenage witch in the Salem vicinity.  It is written in a lightly imitative 17th century, flavorful but not overdoing it.  The narrator thinks the girl is a witch, and the girl thinks she’s a witch, so the novel works as both inventive fantasy and as psychology.  It is a simpler younger cousin of James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), so enjoyable that I am tempted to revisit Johnny Tremain after, oh, not fifty years, but getting close.

Soul (1935-46), Andrey Platonov – I wrote about this terrific collection here.

The Gift (1938), Vladimir Nabokov – I should write at least a little something about this one, which I have read several times.  A favorite novel; a great book.  The quotation in the title above is from the second page.

Near to the Wild Heart (1943), Clarice Lispector – This one received a bit of incomprehension back here.

The Matchmaker (1954), Thornton Wilder – Twelve years ago I read On the Razzle (1981), Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Johann Nestroy’s farce Einen Jux will er sich machen (1842).  Wilder, in his earlier version, moves the fun from Vienna to Yonkers and Manhattan.

The Acceptance World (1955), Anthony Powell – The third novel of Dance to the Music of Time.  Perhaps I will have something to write about it after I read the fourth novel.

A Rage in Harlem (1957), Chester Himes – The portrait of grotesque Harlem from the first, say, half of this novel is astounding.  Then Himes has to move through a plot, which also has its pleasures.

Attila (1991), Aliocha Coll

Attila (2014), Javier Serena – A little bit of stunt publishing here.  I will write a longer note on these two books.  It’s a good stunt.

POETRY

Ten Indian Classics (6th-19th c) – A collection of ten excerpts from the Murty Classical Library of India series for its tenth anniversary.  There is so much to read.

The Necessary Angel (1951) &

Collected Poems (1954), Wallace Stevens - Just the "new" poems, the section titled "The Rock."

Counterparts (1954) &

Brutus's Orchard (1957) &

Collected Poems: 1936-1961 (1962), Roy Fuller - Again, the poems new to this book.

GERTRUDE STEIN

Patriarchal Poetry (1927)

Stanzas in Meditation (1932)

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

Picasso (1938)

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Journal du voleur (1949), Jean Genet – Genet parapatets around Europe cities and prisons, getting by as a beggar, thief, and prostitute.  His great weakness is that his type is brutes, which leads to some ugly places in the 1930s.  The French is somewhat easier and sometimes more abstract than in Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs (1943) but still rough going.  All that slang.

Livro Sexto (1962), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen – Poems of the shore and the sea, but with a little more political protest than usual.

Tempo de Mercês  (1973), Maria Judite de Carvalho – Speaking of more abstract, compared to the earlier two collections I read.  Sad stories where nothing happens.

O Surrealismo Português (2024), Clara Rocha – A volume in a Portuguese series like those Oxford Very Short Introductions.  I wish I had a shelf of them.  Portuguese Surrealism lasted five years.

 

Platonov's Chevengur - “But communism’s about to set in... Why am I finding everything so hard?”

Another remarkable Russian novel finally made it into English last year, Andrey Platonov’s Chevengur, written in 1929 but not published until 1972, in Paris. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler have been translating Platonov for decades now, and this novel and the apparatus they include with it are a triumph.  The Foundation Pit (1930) is a better novel, more focused and inventive, but this one is an event for English-language readers.  By current standards, Chevengur is at least the fourth best book published in the last twenty-five years.

Platonov was, to reiterate my distant last post, not just a writer but an engineer, somehow a scientist but also a mystic who deeply believed in communism but also in its inevitable failure.  In Chevengur, his first novel, this is all as clear as fiction can make it.  A character theorizes about “the possibility of destroying night for the sake of an increase in harvests” (141) – you know, keep the sun out perpetually, by means of science or collective Leninist willpower or something – and although Platonov recognizes that the idea is crazy he, and not just his character, also kind of means it.  It is like, a descendant of, Charles Fourier turning the sea into lemonade.  It is like a communist Atlas Shrugged, if you can imagine that book continually undermining its own ideas, which in a sense it does, but I guess I mean knowingly.

The novel begins in pre-Soviet crisis: famine, typhus, war.  An orphan theme runs through the whole book.  “Horselessness had set in” (91).  “Horselessness” is a fine piece of Platonov, a screwy word that accurately describes the disaster.  There is also hopelessness, of course:

“Where are we going”? said one old man, , who had begun to grow shorter from the hopelessness of life.  “We’re going any which way, till someone curbs us. Turn us around – and we’ll come back again.” (92)

Yet the novel is also a comedy in the tradition of Gogol and Dostoevsky, full of hysterical laughter, as well as Gogol’s tendency for anything to come alive.  The mechanic Zakhar Pavlovich “began to live with resignation, no longer counting on universal radical improvement” (62), a sad condition in a Platonov novel, but he can still talk to the locomotives he repairs:

“I know,” the locomotive sympathized in a deep voice – and sank further into the dark of its cooling strength.

“That’s what I say!” Zakhar Pavlovich agreed.  (64)

The comical catastrophes turn into a long picaresque section, characters wandering through the ruins of the Revolution, bumping into Dostoevsky – “The lame man was called Fyodor Dostoevsky” (140) – and a crazy man named God – “Dvanov set off, along with God” (99).  One of the wanderers is openly a Don Quixote-figure, horse and all, although unlike Quixote he has a strong socialist horse.  Then later there is a second Don Quixote, this time with a suit of armor and a pile of disarmed grenades.

In the second half of the novel, the characters concentrate in the steppe village of Chevengur where perfect communism has been established by the usual bloody methods, but where the great joke is that none of the surviving peasants and rural villagers have any idea what Marxist-Leninist communism is.  They are just making it all up, based on, more than anything, Old Believer Russian Orthodoxy.  How did Platonov think this could be published?  Anyway, things end pretty much as they have to end.

The Chevengur half of the novel is full of heightened Soviet revolutionary language so bizarre that it was soon abandoned.  This makes for a challenge for the translators which they often solve by means of notes.  It is all, unfortunately, not much fun.  Somehow the bleak but lively picaresque half of the novel is a lot of fun, but the static, dialectical village half is not.

“But communism’s about to set in!” Chepurny quietly puzzled in the darkness of his agitation.  “Why am I finding everything so hard?” (290)

Exactly.  Languagehat read Chevengur in Russian fifteen years ago and had a similar experience with the switch between the first half and the second.  And here are two useful posts about reviews of the Chandler translation.  Chevengur got some attention last year.

I will tack on some funny bits about books and reading:

Dostoevsky’s home housed a library of books, but he already knew them by heart.  They brought him no consolation and he now had to do his own personal thinking.  (141)

My worst nightmare!  A few pages later, in “a grove of concentrated, sad trees” we meet a forester who studies his father’s “library of cheap books by the least read, least important, and most forgotten of authors… life’s decisive truths exist secretly in abandoned books”  (150).  “Boring books had their origin in boring readers…” (151).  Chevengur was tough going at times but never boring.

 

Andrey Platonov's "Soul" - the universal happiness of the unhappy

I read Andrey Platonov’s novel Chevengur (1929) not too long ago and the collection of stories Soul (1935-46) last month.  Here we will have some notes.  These are the Robert and Elizabeth Chandler translations (four additional translators assist with Soul).  Those dates are for the completion of the writing; publication was always a complex story for poor Platonov.

Platonov was a rationalist and engineer but also a mystic.  He was a true believer in the, or let’s say a, Soviet experiment, but also fully understood, for rationalist and mystical reasons, that the experiment would always fail.  He had a great writer’s imagination but – no, this should be “and” – had lifelong trouble adapting himself to Soviet censorship.  He was hardly alone there.

I think I will stick with the Soul collection today, and quote from the novella “Soul,” “published” in a single proof copy in 1935, in censored form in 1966, and finally complete in 1999. Which is also when the Chandlers published their English version.

“Soul,” like much of Platonov, is mercilessly grim:

He foresaw that it would probably be his lot to die here and that his nation would be lost, too, ending up as corpses in the desert.  Chagataev felt no regret for himself: Stalin was alive and would bring about the universal happiness of the unhappy anyway, but it was a shame that the Dzhan nation, who had a greater need for life and happiness than any other nation of the Soviet Union, would by then be dead.  (75)

Ambiguous phrase there, "the univeersal happiness of the unhappy."  Chagataev is a young engineer, tasked with leading his “nation,” a nomadic tribe subsisting, barely, in the deserts and marshes between the Caspian and Aral Seas, to Soviet civilization.  Which he does, eventually – happy ending!

The entire Dzhan nation was now living without an everyday sense of its death, working at finding food for itself in the desert, lake and the Ust-Yurt Mountains, just as most of humanity normally lives in the world.  (108)

An unconvincing happy ending given what happens along the way.  Platonov foreshadows the environmental destruction of the Aral Sea and the demographic decline of Russia (the nomads, by the time Chagataev returns to them, are almost all elderly, somehow living off grass and hot water).  Horrible things happen to everyone for many pages.  Chagataev is almost eaten by carrion birds.  But only almost!

Chagataev felt the pain of his sorrow: his nation did not need communism.  It needed oblivion – until the wind had chilled its body and slowly squandered it in space.  (“Soul,” 102)

Animals are treated terribly in “Soul,” and in other stories, no worse than the human animals, but still, the reader sensitive to such things should beware, and in particular get nowhere near the story “The Cow” (written 1938, published 1958) which is like an entry in a “saddest story ever written” contest.  Possibly my favorite thing in “Soul” is a few pages on a flock of feral sheep:

And for several years the sheep had lived in the desert with their sheep dogs; the dogs had taken to eating the sheep, but then the dogs had all died or run away in melancholy yearning, and the sheep had been left on their own, gradually dying of old age, or being killed by wild beasts, or straying into waterless sands.  (62)

“[D]ying of old age” is remarkable; the “melancholy yearning” of the absent dogs is a superb Gogolian touch.

The other stories in the Soul collection are also good if you have the emotional strength to read them.

Chevengur tomorrow.