Reading Finnegans Wake

In 65 days from now, on April 15th 2025, we are taking our first major family trip since moving to Berlin in June 2022, and will be flying to Dublin for a week. I was last in Ireland in 2004, over 20 years ago, when I was 20 years old and had just finished my sophomore year in college. Since then it has been a lifetime of things: marriage, three children, finishing college, finishing graduate school (twice), five major moves (one intercontinental), two Big Cities (Chicago and Berlin, where we currently are), three smaller cities (Austin, Dallas, Asheville), an almost three-year-long Zwischenzeit during a pandemic and living with family (Outer Banks, North Carolina), so many friends made, and more close friends than I deserve. Starting my career for what seems like half of that time, becoming a teacher and a scholar, mastering more ancient languages than is polite to mention in conversation, slowly getting better at one modern one (German) and all the while watching my children utterly master it in a year. Almost all of this with my partner and best friend and mother of my children. 

Facing these 65 days before our trip, in the beginning of the year and through a busy time of work obligations, I'm going to do something in preparation. This will be alongside the anxious budgeting and saving, reading through guidebooks, making itineraries and packing lists, checking bus and train schedules. Alongside all of that, I will do something to prepare myself for the trip, and will most likely not tell anyone about it, except through writing about it here. I will be reading James Joyce's Finnegans Wake in its entirety. 

James Joyce is my favorite writer, back since high school (O precocious me), when I felt the urge to learn about Ireland, since that is where my mother's family is from. She was the first generation in her family to be born outside of Ireland in the US. Maybe I should have started with someone easier; although I have read much Yeats over the years, and have learned and come to love so much about Ireland in the past 20+ years, both during my first trip there and afterwards, reading Joyce has become one of the most me things about me. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake have shaped the way I think and see the world, and relate myself to art, language, and the pursuit of truth and beauty, more than anything else. Already 20 years ago, when first in Ireland, it was a powerful experience to connect my readings in Joyce to my experience of Dublin, more powerful even (for better or for worse) than the connections to my own family history. This next time, in 65 days, a similarly powerful experience is waiting for me, though now with the added layers of showing Dublin to my children, and experiencing it with my wife.

65 days of Finnegans Wake: that's about 10 pages a day. A very respectable amount for nearly any book ever written; but for this one? It won't be easy.

A page (one of my favorites) from my personal copy of the book

Reading this book has been a constant endeavor of mine for ages (along with Ulysses, though more so I think at this point). I wouldn't say I have read the entire thing, but I have read a lot of it, and some of it many times. Some of it I know really well and love dearly. Much of it still seems like a wilderness to me. Maybe reading Finnegans Wake isn't something I am super proud of; I read it periodically, and intensely, and usually, after a period of days or weeks of intense engagement, I put it down and sometimes feel embarrassed about spending so much of my energy on this, at times, inscrutable thing. Having spent so much time with it, I have a feeling that I need to finally submit it by submitting myself to it, and force the issue: have I wasted my time? Can I read this book? Should I continue? 

So, I am going to read 10 pages of Finnegans Wake every day until I leave with my family for a trip, and am going to blog about it. I am not going to summarize what I read or produce a guide for it. I just want to say something about it everyday, and in doing that say something about myself. There is going to be a lot I am going to miss, although I do have a lot of notes in my copy from over the years. But the book is not ever meant to be finished, so why not take a brisk tour? Plus, and sorry to be a bit mawkish, I'm hoping I'll find myself in those pages too. Writing is a challenge for me, and although I am slowly getting the hand of the specialized genre of academic writing, I still feel that my creative potential is unrealized, and worried that it is falling away. I don't see myself in the words I write. My voice does not seem to be there on the page or screen. I never posted much on social media, or blogged in any extensive way before; I have been journaling as of late but not regularly enough. The only writing I do is when I struggle through an academic piece. But I'm not going to find my true voice there. In contrast to that, it is only when teaching (and only on the best days) where I feel like I am able to express myself in a way where I am actually creating, and connecting to something deep inside me. It is time to be able to do this with writing as well. If I've read this book for so long, yet can't say anything meaningful about it, let alone feel comfortable admitting to people that I'm a reader, what is the point? Can Finnegans Wake help me find myself as a writer?