On the basis of the mountainous Joyce scholarship, I had always presumed the documentary archive was pretty much worked over. The author of Finnegans Wake couldn't read his own book. For the rest of the literate world, however, it has remained an impenetrable morass of fevered gibberish, stylistic showing-off and made-up words that you can't even check in the dictionary.Īnd today I can reveal – in the kind of sizzling, book-sational exclusive our slugabed competitors can only dream about – that even James Joyce himself can be included in that group. Within days of publication, an entire Finnegans Wake-based industry had sprung up in academia, with eggheads under such pressures of production that they had to sub-contract much of the meta-textual and semiotic analysis work to factories in the Far East. It's the work of linguistic gobbledegook that all other works of linguistic gobbledegook reverentially call "The Supreme Being". Maybe.Īs I understand it, the book consists of one single word of approximately 550,000 letters. Rose and O'Hanlon say the new version is a "smoother" read – but this is clearly a fib, because Finnegans Wake is not, and never will be, comprehensible to anybody outside of, maybe, God. Finnegans Wake has attained mythic status, not because of inherent greatness or influence but because most people are unsure if it actually exists, since they've never met, or even heard about, anyone who's finished it. On the other hand, in this case, the fact is that all their labours won't make a lick of difference because James Joyce's famously unreadable novel will unquestionably remain, well, unread.
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