"Dear Reader" and "Drear Writer": Joyce's Direct Addresses to His Readers in Finnegans Wake

Abstract

No major literary work since medieval times has a reputation of being more difficult for reader than Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Aware of difficulty of his text, hoped and indeed expected that reader suffering from an ideal insomnia (120.13-14) would devote time necessary to appreciate this book about operations of mind at nighttime (much as Ulysses focused on daytime streams of consciousness).(1) The fact that Joyce, like eighteenth-century novelists, frequently addresses his readers throughout Wake - advising, cajoling, and mocking industrious insomniacs - is a key aspect of book that has received relatively little attention.(2) Considered together, Joyce's conversations with his readers function like a comic user-friendly reader's manual to very complex program that is Finnegans Wake. Herenow chuck english and learn to pray plain. . . . Think in your stomach (579.20-22), reader is advised at one point. Early in book, narrator/author admits about his text, in a fairly typical comment, What a mnice old mness it all mnakes! (19.7-8). The narrator is confused, too, and thus narrator and reader are invoked together on several occasions in first person plural: Thus unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude (57.16-17). Or as we are told later, We are once amore as babes awondering in a wold made fresh where with hen in storyaboot we start from scratch (336.16-18). The narrator makes fun of readers, both male and female: You is feeling like you was lost in bush, boy? (112.3). So sorry you lost him, poor lamb! Of course I know you are a viry vikid girl to go in dreemplace (527.4-6). Yet the. narrator's equally frequent self-mockery establishes identification and sympathy between narrator and reader, who are lost together in world of Wake. Similarly, if I refer interchangeably in this essay to Joyce and the narrator, it is because no clear distinction between two (or rather, between an intrusive author and his various narrators) is maintained in Finnegans Wake.(3) Among theorists and Joyceans, knowledge that in revising Wake deliberately sought to make its language increasingly dense, obscure, and elaborate has only encouraged attitude that reading this book is an exercise in futility. Even so influential and insightful a critic of fiction and its relationship to reader as Wayne Booth, in his pioneering book The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), claimed that Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are works that cannot be read; they can only be studied (325). As for students and other readers, industry with all of its extensive guidebooks to understanding and his world has been perhaps more obstacle than aid. John Henry Raleigh, himself author of a guidebook to Ulysses, admits that such guides . . . can intimidate beginning student of their subject (10). He humorously imagines conscientious student trying to wade through all of Joycean guides: What I have in mind is an ideal student with an ideal desire to use all resources of Master. . . . My hypothetical student sits down at his desk, text of Ulysses open before his eyes, his reference books arranged about text. . . . He can either engage a friend to turn pages for him or, if he has some money, he can buy mechanical book-page turners (9). If this is case for Ulysses, reader's task with Finnegans Wake appears even more overwhelming. For example, Frances Motz Boldereft does not consider reader except as one who must learn Joyce's glossary, Ireland's history, and so on in order to even begin reading book. In more recent years, idea that reading Wake is a playfully futile task was further encouraged, of course, by rise of deconstruction, with its insistence that every text contradicts itself and eludes reader. …