On the Verge of the Wake: Joyce's Reading in Notebook VI.B.10

‘‘riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.’’ Thus begins the world’s most impenetrable novel, James Joyce’s 1939 Finnegans Wake. The novel, ‘‘about’’ nothing, composed of at least 60 languages, swerving and bending for 628 pages in an idiom that seems to derive from the Tribe of the Word-Hashers, hangs as a thundercloud over the head of every self-respecting reader. Even intellectual omnivores are mostly familiar only with the opening page. Finnegans Wake makes illiterates of all who open it. How did Joyce start this man-built mad verbiage? To understand what he was up to, we must explore that dark and wordheavy raincloud that gave rise to the Wake and trace how it grew from an unlikely drop of water vapor. I want to examine the origin of the novel’s origins, its very conception and its first shaky words—not the first words of the first page of the Wake, but the first words Joyce wrote after Ulysses. Summer 1922. Ulysses was shining Greek-flag blue in the window of Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library in the Rue de l’Odéon in Paris. The display book was soon replaced by a simple sign, ‘‘Ulysses by James Joyce is sold out,’’ pasted on graph paper in the shop window. All 750 copies of the first edition were gone. After seven years of toils and troubles, trials and tribulations, the novel that has recently been voted ‘‘Novel of the Twentieth Century’’ had finally been published. Joyce calculated that the book, weighing 1550 grams and astronomically priced at 150 francs, was written at 21 addresses and had taken him 20,000 hours of work. Readers and critics alike agreed that this was the limit. The word could not be become any more book nor any more