Probably the secret to reading Joyce’s almost incomprehensible Finnegans Wake is to realize that the entire book derives from an incident narrated in the second paragraph of the second chapter, a paragraph beginning with, “A baser meaning has been read into these characters the literal sense of which decency can safely scarcely hint.”
The incident involves our hero H.C.E. (or Here Comes Everybody) spying upon two girls in a park who must relieve what “dame nature in all innocency” required.
One of these girls is probably, in some sense, H.C.E.’s wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle of the Liffey River, the subject of the gossipy two washerwomen in the famous chapter eight.
In any case, someone was spying on H.C.E. on the evening in question, and rumors about the incident have spread everywhere, the rumor changing as it spreads.
This provides Joyce with a framework in which to joke for more than five hundred pages, going in every possible digression.
His method is stream of consciousness, which allows him to make the weirdest and wildest connections between unconnected things, all in a jumble like a drunkard’s mind.
Finnegans Wake is a funny book, a joke of jokes, a joke about itself and about the whole human project, the laugh of a nihilist trying to make light of it all, or the drunken burblings of a man who finds peace in brief comedy and oblivion, oblivion even of language.
I suggest that a successful reading of Finnegans Wake requires the reader to pull back, relax, and not seek too diligently to understand the comical confusions of a drunkard’s dreamings. The continual concatenation of words eventually becomes a hole like the hole of Anna Livia, the mother of one hundred and eleven children, the hole of a mythical Earth Mother through whom the reader sees either nothingness or comical observations such as that of footnote #28 in chapter ten, where Issy writes, “I have heard this word [“hole”] used by Martin Halpin, an old gardener from the Glens of Antrim who used to do odd jobs for my grandfather, the Rev. B. B. Brophy of Swords.”
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available at Amazon for $4.91.