INTRODUCTION TO THE READING FROM FINNIGANS WAKE
By Angus Johnston
As Madeleine was slipping away, I made plans to come here to
Philadelphia to sit with her in the hospital. When I let the folks
on her email list know that I'd be coming down, a flood of people
wrote to ask that I pass along a message, or read something to her -
a passage that she had loved, or one that had power to the person
who suggested it.
One of the first requests came from Nathan Tenny, someone I'd never
met. "Read the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of [James Joyce's]
Finnegans Wake" to her, he said. "She is absolutely passionate about
that passage; it's a passage that was born to be read aloud; and it
already straddles the boundary between waking and dream states."
I'd never read anything by Joyce, and I knew next to nothing about
Finnegans Wake - only that it was supposed to be absurdly dense and
complicated. But several people echoed Nathan's suggestion, and
Misha Tepper, who lives not too far from me, offered to lend me her
copy of the book.
So I grabbed a shower, threw some clothes in a bag, and got in my
car. It was dark by then, and snowing, As I pulled up in front of
Misha's apartment and rolled down my window, she thrust the book at
me. It was, she wrote later, "a very odd moment: 'She's in critical
condition! Take this literature to her, pronto! ...a-and perhaps a
haddock, and some shrubbery!'"
When I told Nathan that I wasn't familiar with Joyce, he gave me
some advice - which I'll now pass on to those of you who share my
confusion. "You have to read slowly, for sound rather than sense,"
he said, "and not worry about trying to back up and fix the
inevitable stumbles." It looks like prose, but it has to be taken in
like poetry, or maybe even music.
I read all of the chapter Nathan suggested to Madeleine over the
next twenty-four hours, and parts of it more than once. The passage
I'm going to read now is about food, and about cooking for someone
you love, and about coffee. It's full of beautiful made-up words and
sentences that almost but not quite make sense. It's got a beat, and
you can dance to it. I can see why Madeleine loved it so. I'm
grateful to have had the chance to share it with her, and to share
it with you now.
Reading excerpt from page 199.