Adrenalise

I think of Finnegan's Wake as being like The Sound and the Fury but without the awakening. It is like a river of words. Like a river, the words flow in an ebb and current that you are powerless to control. At various points along the river you grab onto a rock - a pun that you think you understand, a joke that you think you get. Something solid and tangible that you can cling onto to make sense of the moment you find yourself in. But the words flow inexorably and eventually you must let go. The most difficult thing about Finnegan's Wake is being subjected to a force you cannot control and letting it sweep you away. I do not think it is a novel that you can truly read (and i use this term in the loosest sense). You follow the river to its source, which is both its beginning and its end. I think it is a difficult thing to comprehend and depending on your mood, it may be a difficult experience to put yourself through. I often find the thought of putting myself through it too much but every once in a while I want to let go and I'm drawn to it for a moment. I have never read it from the first page to the last page and I don't feel as there are any logical start or end points. I jump into the river at any point on any page and begin drowning. Sometimes I have to stop whilst other times I can look at the words on the page for a time and get lost in the wake. Either way its not something I could say that I "read" and I'm not sure how much you can get from it by atomising it. However if its something you wish to do in a scholarly capacity, it would probably keep you preoccupied for a life time.

The Sound and the Fury is only difficult because of the first 2 chapters, and ironically enough, it is usually because the reader seriously overcomplicates it. The one piece of encouragement I would give to people wishing to read it for the first time is this: It is like a jigsaw puzzle. In the beginning, you have fragments of information, names and places but nothing that seems to connect. This is normal and things will get better later. Until then you must be content not knowing, you must experience what it is like to be confused, to hear words but take no meaning from them. It is important and everything matters. As you read further you are given more information, more pieces of the puzzle. There are 4 chapters and you will not really begin to see purpose or meaning to what you are reading until the 3rd chapter. After that the peices rapidly begin to fall into place and you begin to build up a picture. At some point you will know what it is that you are seeing and reading and you will intimately of the lives you are reading about because you have lived them. It will arrive like an epiphany. I have never read a novel before or since that does anything like this. Whatever pain you must go through to reach that point will be worth it when you get to look down from the summit.

I'm uncomfortable with the idea of anything being overrated or underrated because in the end, every piece of work is what it is and a large part of it is to do with how the reader connects with and interpretes it. A novel is not just the sum of its strengths but also its flaws, both of which will define it. It can take on a life of its own, beyond the intent of its author but only if you let it happen. I prefer to think that if something does not affect me, it is because I lack some necessary insight that would enable an appreciation of it. Jean Rhys wrote extensively from experience of the lives of young women as outsiders. At certain times when I found myself on the outside, I empathized strongly with her work, in particular Wide Sargasso Sea and Good Morning, Midnight. I thought her writing was hauntingly beautiful but I don't necessarily regard the quality of prose as a requirement for an appreciation of a novel. If it is the most appropriate way of expressing an idea, then it cannot and should not be said in any other way, even if it is ugly. My first post on this forum was about William Burrough's Naked Lunch which is frankly a mess, but could it or should it have been any other way? He saw and did ugly things and his prose was fit for purpose. It is worth noting that Jean Rhys did not receive any critical acclaim for her work and did not enjoy commercial success until very late in her life, so you could just as well argue that her work was in fact highly underrated for decades. Nevertheless, in Wide Sargasso Sea she created a person of a marionette. She gave the mad Creole women in Rochester's loft the power to choose her own name, she gave her a past, a voice, a life left behind and a life yearned for. And the greatest thing about it is that it takes nothing away from Jane Eyre, the novel to which I have heard it compared unfavourably to as the real deal to Rhys' fanfic. It actually adds a more horrifying dimension to Jane Eyre but stands alone and apart as a work in its own right. Throughout, she gives a voice to Antoinette Cosway that draws from the lifelong experiences of Rhys as an outsider, a drifter and a shadow. When she began to get recognition for Wide Sargasso Sea she famously said "If I could choose, I would rather be happy than write...If I could live my life all over again, and choose..." Still sends a shiver down my spine.

I keep revisiting this novel and it feels like time for me to read it again, but for anyone attempting it for the first time, perhaps this post will help you find your bearings. You can think of the novel as a collection of vignettes, though it is sometimes difficult to tell where one vignette ends and another begins because they are not always clearly demarcated. When these vignettes have ruccuring people and places, it is sometimes disorienting. You can forget where you are, where you've been and where you are going. If you wish to make sense of the novel by understanding the method used in its creation, you may want to read Oliver Harris's The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945-1959. Through his letter writing over this period, you get a better idea of why Naked Lunch is written the way it is. Burroughs called these vignettes "routines" and they were extemporaneous performance pieces, usually written or spoken quickly and honestly from experience. They are not necessarily complete or self contained nor are they always factually accurate. There is a myth that Naked Lunch's eccentricities were a result of the author writing whilst high and that the chapters were ordered randomly but that doesn't mesh with what Burroughs wrote about the genesis of the novel in private correspondence. Some of his most deranged routines like the parable of the talking asshole were written quickly during a period of his life when he was undergoing rehabilitation, after a great personal tragedy. Several parts of the novel are autobiographical and to get a better idea of where the fiction meets the reality, you need to know a little bit about the life of William Burroughs. Briefly, he was a wealthy heir and had a privileged upbringing. He was Harvard educated and generously sponsored by his family after his education ended. He was gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal but he did marry and had a son. He used his sponsorship to travel extensively and for recreation which became an addiction. He became a morphine addict. He was arrested many times and fled to Mexico where he accidentally shot and killed his wife. He spent time in exile evading law enforcement and traveled to Tangier where he wrote the episodes that would become Naked Lunch. He wrote to Allen Ginsberg once saying that "wherever I go and whatever I do, I am always in the straightjacket of junk." Junk can be substituted for any method of control, even though junk literally dominated Burrough's life. In the ironically named Freeland, Burroughs depicts a society that needs no police because every individual is under persistent survelience by everyone else. I think the idea is that in being addicted to junk, it is so easy to convince yourself that you do so of your own free will and it is difficult to acknowledge that it has a powerful hold over you. He speaks of it the same way that he does of other systems of control. Many of his routines concern people and institutions that have become trapped in a cycle of dysfunction and self destruction. Benway was a doctor who lost his practising cert but continued to perform cut price abortions in subway toilets. As crazy as it sounds, there are people that do this, so habituated to a lifetime of practice that they continue the pretense of being a professional, even when it violates the professional code of conduct. When it is all you have ever done, is it dso easy to start over as something else? When you read Naked Lunch you might pick up on where his tendancy to exaggerate, satirize and sensationalise stray painfully close to personal tragedy. You may read Naked Lunch as an exorcism of personal demons and a journey through dark places that Burroughs visited. Interzone is a place in the novel but in his personal letters it is also a term that Burrough's used for his works in progress. The people and places are not necessarily literal and are sometimes manifestations of a state of mind, one filled with uncertainty about the future and haunted by decisions that have been made and which cannot be undone. But the novel is also greater than the sum of its parts and the decisions Burroughs made and had to live with. The first time I read it as a protest novel, savage in its satire of government that persecutes some of its own, a financial elite that scams its customers, an ethical code and a law that forbids murder but permits execution. What made it remarkable to me was that it came from a person on the streets in the words of the streets. It uses comedy as a means to make astute observations that are in a way immune to criticism because it is not written in the language of politics and laws. As each episode bleeds into the next, the novel sometimes tricks you into laughing at terrible things. Erotica turns into peadophilia which turns into a mass execution in Hassan's Rumpus Room. In the span of a few pages you no longer know whats funny and whats disgusting anymore. The title allegedy refers to a moment where you see clearly (for the first time) what is on the end of every fork. The moment when you wake up to some uncomfortable realities that you never thought of or didn't want to think of, and perhaps your own complicity in the misery of others. I could write essays about the specifics of it, but I need to go through the novel again before going into specifics.