“One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.”

- James Joyce
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Plotless Connections
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Influenced by the philosophy of Whitehead, process theology says that every moment of human life begins with pre-reflective, pre-grammatical depths in which there is pure, complex feeling but no plot. Process theologians speak of these depths as experience in the mode of causal efficacy, amid which we feel the feelings of the past actual world. Not just our own worlds but those of others, too. In order to understand ourselves, we need to make contact with these depths and learn to live from their vital energies and myriad forms of connectedness. There is within the depths of reality a lure toward wholeness, but this lure cannot be effective unless we know the depths of plotless connections. Finnegans Wake invites us to these depths.

- Jay McDaniel

"Understanding" Finnegans Wake

​from BBC Radio 3

Listening to Finnegans Wake
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Wake Thoughts

Finnegans Wake is worth talking about, even if you've read only snatches. Just one page. The idea of a circular novel without a plot, that is best read together and out loud, that doesn't make sense but evokes feelings and stories, that avoids standard punctuations and makes up words, that has characters floating in and out, changing names - that's an idea we need when everything else is so predictable, so algorithmic. Finnegans Wake occurs in dreamtime. It reminds us that elemental experience is far removed from conscious linearity. [1]



"These days my life seems like a page from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. It doesn't have a discernible plot, and I can't even understand the words on its pages. They say that Joyce was linguistically omnipotent. He could make up his own language and create worlds of his own. As for me, I'm just trying to make my way in the plotlessness." [2]
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"When you accept that you can’t perfectly decipher this thing, you set yourself free to notice rather than solve, and you’ll start to notice a lot. You’ll notice, for one thing, that Finnegans Wake deals with basic, shared, elemental experiences—of dreams, of water, of private chitchat. And it does all this in its own dreamy, fluid language. As Samuel Beckett wrote, of Joyce and the Wake, 'His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.'" [3]




"Unlike most books, which are meant to be enjoyed in quiet solitude, Finnegans Wake is a book best read together and read out loud. Every reader contributes something unique to the interpretation of the often-obscure text." [4]




The work is not written in English, or in any other language, as language is commonly known. I can detect words made up out of some eight or nine languages, but this must be only a part of the equipment employed. This polyglot element is only a minor difficulty, for Mr Joyce is using language in a new way:

"Margaritomancy! Hyacinthous pervinciveness! Flowers. A cloud. But Bruto and Cassio are ware only of trifid tongues the whispered wilfulness ('tis demonal!) and shadows shadows multiplicating."..

What he is attempting, I imagine, is to employ language as a new medium, breaking down all grammatical usages, all time space values, all ordinary conceptions of context. Compared with this, Ulysses is a first-form primer. [5]

1. Jay McDaniel   
2. Karen, college undergraduate
3. Reading James Joyce's Finnegans Wake 
4. Casey Lawrence, Finnegans Wake Reading Group, The Cosmic Library
5. The Guardian, first review, May 11, 1939

Start Anywhere

"One of the most amazing things about Finnegans Wake is you can pick up the book from just about anywhere. This is especially helpful when one is considering joining a Finnegans Wake Reading Group, such as the one I run at Modernist Studies Ireland. Because the book doesn’t have a plot or characters in the strictest sense, it doesn’t have to be read from start to finish.

Instead of telling a linear story, the book universalizes the story of an Irish family — a father, mother, daughter and twin sons — through the ages, repeating and restarting and remembering and refashioning the basic facts over and over until they encompass, somehow, the history of the world itself.

*

The repetition of the same stories makes the book intensely readable, despite most critics’ views to the contrary. Critics who didn’t ‘get it’ and readers who gave up on the Wake likely tried to tackle this incredible book alone — which does not make for the best experience. While Finnegans Wake is very readable, unlike most books — which are solitary exercises — it is best read aloud and in a group. In-person or online, find your tribe. Every member of a group’s experience of the text will be different, as each of us brings something unique to the table. Whether it’s knowing another language, remembering a snippet of a folk song, or finding an intertextual clue, having multiple people at the table helps to read the book. Why? Finnegans Wake is extremely intertextual. It is made up of references to other texts, stories, songs, languages, poems, jokes, faerie tales. Because it tries to be this ‘universal’ text, no single person’s worldly experience is enough to decode it. As a group, we stand a better chance.

- Casey Lawrence

Process Theology and Finnegans Wake

Linguistic Omnipotence, Divine Omnipotence,
and the Gift of Undecipherability

Linguistic omnipotence is the idea that language has an almost unlimited power to create our lives and the worlds around us. Divine omnipotence is the idea that the creative source of the universe likewise has such power, albeit entirely unlimited. God can create a universe through speaking. God "calls" the world into existence and the world obeys. 

Process theologians believe that God calls the world into existence, but that God's calling requires the cooperation of a world. God calls the world through lures for feeling, to which the world responds in whatever state of existence it finds itself. God and the world are co-creative. God is powerful but not omnipotent. If God makes up a language we cannot understand, we will be confused, almost as if we are reading Finnegans Wake.
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Finnegans Wake by Irish writer James Joyce was first published in 1939. Considered one of the most difficult works in the English language, the book employs a stream of consciousness style of writing, with hidden jokes and linguistic experiments. The book is so complex that eighty years after its publication, there is still no real consensus on what the plot is, or indeed, if there even is a plot. The same goes for characters, with critics still not entirely sure if there are main characters or not.

The initial response to Finnegans Wake was almost completely negative, even by those close to the author, some believing the book to be a joke, some merely saying it was incomprehensible. H. G. Wells wrote to Joyce asking - 'who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousands I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?'
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However, it's unusual style led it to be studied and analysed - something it seems Joyce had planned on. He once made a comment that only by making it obscure, and therefore neccessary to study, could he be sure it would be around for a long time. (Global Grey ebooks)

A little rusty on James Joyce? Here is a list of some of his most influential novels offered by chatGPT.

1. "Dubliners" (1914): This collection of 15 short stories was Joyce's first published work, and it is widely regarded as a masterpiece of modernist literature. The stories are set in Dublin, Ireland, and they offer a vivid and unsentimental portrait of life in the city at the turn of the 20th century.
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3. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1916): This novel is a semi-autobiographical account of Joyce's early years. It follows the life of Stephen Dedalus, a young man who struggles to find his place in a society that is deeply conflicted about its Irish identity. The novel is notable for its use of stream-of-consciousness narration and its depiction of the spiritual journey of its protagonist.


4. "Ulysses" (1922): Considered by many to be Joyce's masterpiece, "Ulysses" is a dense and complex novel that follows the lives of three characters over the course of a single day in Dublin. The novel is celebrated for its use of multiple narrative styles and its exploration of themes such as identity, sexuality, and mortality.
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6. "Finnegans Wake" (1939): Joyce's final novel is a notoriously difficult and experimental work that is written in a language that is entirely of Joyce's own invention. The novel is an attempt to capture the dreamlike quality of the human mind, and it is celebrated for its use of puns, wordplay, and other forms of linguistic innovation.

​Note that Finnegans Wake is written in a language that is (almost) entirely of Joyce's own invention. Here is an excerpt:
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​The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.

As a result of this novelty, very few people in the world actually read the novel or care about it. To be sure, for some among the literary elite, mostly English language speakers, it brings great pleasure.

​Here is how one group describes the novel and the pleasures of its undecipherability.
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James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake doesn’t work like other novels. It has lines like, “What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishy-gods!” In some ways, this makes the book almost impossible to read. H.G. Wells told Joyce, “You have turned your back on common men—on their elementary needs … What is the result? Vast riddles.” The Wake doesn’t have to be difficult, though; you don’t have to read it as a collection of unsolvable riddles. In Finnegan and Friends, we don’t regard the Wake as something to decode completely. Instead, we find in the book a well of inspiration for endless exploration.
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When you accept that you can’t perfectly decipher this thing, you set yourself free to notice rather than solve, and you’ll start to notice a lot. You’ll notice, for one thing, that Finnegans Wake deals with basic, shared, elemental experiences—of dreams, of water, of private chitchat. And it does all this in its own dreamy, fluid language. As Samuel Beckett wrote, of Joyce and the Wake, “His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.”

Still, for most readers, Finnegans Wake is simply impossible to read. 

And so it is for the world itself, for some who believe in omnipotence, When they look at the world around us, presupposing that it is overseen by an omnipotent God who could intervene at any point and make things just and fair, the world often becomes, as it were, undecipherable. They simply cannot understand it. 

True, people who believe in divine omnipotence do not give up on the world. They cannot do so; they are in the world, like it or now. The world becomes, for them, a confusing and confused mystery. It becomes Finnegans Wake.

This does not mean that the world cannot be enjoyed for its aesthetic value. There are moments of pleasure and delight. But there is no discernible plot to the world that makes sense ethically or even theologically. The omnipotent God is a mystery, not unlike the linguistically omnipotent Joyce whose Finnegans Wake is a mystery.

Making Music from Finnegans Wake
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Why Read Finnegans Wake?
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Linguistic Omnipotence:
​The Challenge and Problem of Finnegans Wake

James Joyce is sometimes said to be linguistically omnipotent. The 

​The challenge of Finnegans Wake is that it is tremendously difficult to read. The problem is that few if any people read it. It is the consummation of