A reading club in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, tells me it has just completed Finnegans Wake, after an effort lasting “28 years”.
That’s 11 years longer than it took James Joyce to write the book. But in fairness, the group was in no hurry, meeting once a month since 1995 to read a page at a time and discussing it for two hours.
Besides, you can never complete Finnegans Wake, really, because it’s a circle. The novel’s apparent last line - “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” – doubles around to meet the first – “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s ...” And so on, forever.
Thus, after reading page 628 on Tuesday night, the Venice Beach people will return to page one (or page three as it is in their and my well-thumbed edition) next month and start all over again.
The group was set up by Gerry Fialka, an experimental film-maker and man of many parts, one of which used to involve being production assistant for avant-garde rocker Frank Zappa.
He doesn’t consider himself a scholar, and has not even read Joyce’s other books: the usual gateway drugs through which the small but incurable band of Wake addicts get sucked in.
But his obsessions also extend to the media philosopher Marshal McLuhan, of “global village” fame – there’s a separate section of the group to read him – who was himself a devotee of Finnegans Wake and considered Joyce a sort of prophet.
McLuhan’s epiphanies about the Wake include deciphering the “thunder words”: a series of 10 polyglot constructions, nine of 100 letters each, one of 101, strewn throughout the text.
These, he believed, summed up the “reverberating consequences of the major technological changes in human history”, the last of them a prediction of television.
Fialka’s many aids to reader comprehension include a recording of Joyce himself reading an extract in exaggeratedly lilting Hibernian patois.
This is a sort of Rosetta Stone for FW, at least in that it demonstrates that the words need to be heard to be understood. But as revealed in its participant comments section, the Californian group-reading experience has evoked a wide range of reactions, not always positive.
One woman described the meetings as “a wonderful release from my astral pinnings – clearing my mind and revealing a path through the fog of dualities.”
Another reader found FW “painfully Irish” (he could say that being three-quarter Irish himself) and added that while he was intrigued by the idea it should be “sung aloud”, the book had yet to win him over. “I still perceive Joyce as an arrogant wanker,” he wrote.
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Adam and Eve’s church, referenced in FW’s opening line, is barely 400 metres from where I write this. It’s usually closed when I pass. But the email from Venice Beach prompted a quick visit on Wednesday while daily Mass was in progress, with the 11 Franciscan celebrants not greatly outnumbered by their modest congregation.
Even by Dublin standards, the church and its environs have had an extraordinarily turbulent history. On the adjacent Merchants Quay in 1597, for example, 24,000 pounds of gunpowder bound for Dublin Castle exploded, collapsing houses on Winetavern Street, as well as the roof of Christchurch Cathedral, and killing 200.
Soldiers raided and destroyed a chapel here in 1629, during Mass. And the nickname immortalised by Joyce (it’s officially the Franciscan Church of the Immaculate Conception) dates from the Penal Laws, when Mass-goers met in secret at the back of a tavern called Adam & Eve’s.
Masses were also said in local houses, including an upstairs room that collapsed once under the weight of numbers, with more fatalities.
In modern times, the church had a front-row view of the shelling of the Four Courts, just opposite, during the Civil War. And today, Merchant’s Quay is the scene of a lesser but also sad drama, thanks to the Francisicans’ drug rehabilitation work.
A crowd of bedraggled, emaciated users had gathered there on Wednesday, including one man who turned his back in a doorway to light something as I passed, just as a Garda car pulled in and the occupants got out to have a word.
A woman moved off hastily at the sight of the car and called to a friend: “I told you not to hang around on Wednesday – it’s rap day”. Meanwhile, another beaten-down-looking woman apologised for blocking my path although, God love her, she hadn’t – she was too thin to be in anyone’s way.
Joyce may have reversed the Adam and Eve name partly for reasons of euphony. But I’m told by those who know that he had another purpose, in keeping with his method of investing words with multiple meanings and with the book’s theme of the fall and rise of mankind.
It is no coincidence, apparently, that “Past Eve and Adam’s” includes the word “Pa” and the name ‘Steve[a]n”.
The Wake’s intro thereby references both the death of Joyce’s father and the birth of his grandson, which occurred within weeks around the New Year of 1932, and about which sad conjunction he also wrote a poem.