Finnegans Wake: Genius or Gibberish?

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend 

of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to 

Howth Castle and Environs. 

Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen- 

core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy 

isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor 

had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse 

to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper 

all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to 

tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a 

kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in 

vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a 

peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory 

end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.

That was the first 2 paragraphs of Finnegans Wake, the infamous novel by James Joyce. Joyce was a 20th century Irish author, known for his dense prose and “stream of consciousness” writing style. He wrote some of the most controversial books in history, and this is the granddaddy of them all.

“The Wake” is 628 pages, contains 63,000 unique words, over 500 characters, and, above all, is completely unintelligible. On a first read, it looks like an uncorrelated jumble of words. 

Despite that, the work has been studied ad nauseum by literary scholars for years. Thousands of PhD. theses analyze this dense wall of gibberish, which begs the question: Why?

From a STEM perspective, the prospect of devoting your career to a book, much less an impenetrable linguistic confetti, is ludicrous. What a waste of tax money, right?

Not so fast… On the surface, FW looks like nonsense. But as you dig deeper it becomes more and more interesting. After some thought, I’ve concluded that FW is the most interesting string of characters ever assembled, so let’s start digging.

First, we must address the plot. In my opinion, there isn’t one, at least in the traditional sense of plot. Of course, scholars have argued about this for 70 years, and they have come to a consensus on what the narrative is, but for our purposes that’s not important. It is healthier to not expect a coherent narrative at first, because you won’t find one right away.

The best place to start is the title. Finnegans Wake borrows from an old irish folk song of the same name. The song is a comedy about a bricklayer named Finnegan, who got drunk and falls off his wall and dies. The book (in one interpretation) is the contents of Finn’s mind as he slowly dies on the ground. 

With that in mind, the writing style makes a little more sense. The stream of thoughts of a dying man need not makes sense, and probably won’t. A fine approach is to read it out loud in an Irish accent and just enjoy the music.

But, still, it is far from meaningless poetry. In fact, every single sentence has 2+ meanings. Look closely at some of the individual words. The whole passage is overflowing with portmanteau and double entendre. FW is basically 600 pages of cryptic puns, complex puzzles, and esoteric references. There are layers upon layers of meaning in every sentence, no word is superfluous. It took Joyce 17 years to craft, and he died shortly after it’s publishing. It is certainly not a stream of random.

But it’s not just a collection of puns and puzzles, either. While it might seem a bit far-fetched now,  Joyce attempts to capture the totality of human experience. The 3rd paragraph on the first page starts like this: 

The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntqnner- 

ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur- 

nuk!)...

See that word in the parentheses? We call that a Thunder word. There are ten ‘Thunder words’ distributed through the text, and each one is said to signal a phase transition in the narrative (whatever that means). Each one exactly 100 characters long, and are apparently cryptograms meant to represent a different age of human civilization. This one represents the transition from the paleolithic to neolithic era (can you see it?).

Additionally, the entire book is cyclical. The first sentence is actually the completion of the last sentence. Joyce was heavily influenced by Giambattista Vico, who wrote about the cyclic nature of civilizations in his 1725 opus, Scienza Nuova. 

I hope you can start to see why some view this as a book of cosmic importance. I’ll leave this point to Joyce himself, he said in an interview: "If the whole universe was to be destroyed and only Finnegans Wake survived, then the goal is that the whole universe could be reconstructed out of it".

That’s right, Finnegans Wake was an attempt to compress all of the past and future of humanity into one volume. It’s the output of a linguistic shredder, a clever braid of cultural strands that ultimately captures the essence of existence… or something like that.

That might sound a little grand to the more pragmatic, but it’s not actually that different from what we do here at NMT. FW, Science, and Math are all ontologies, a dense web of concepts that seek to represent what is real within a certain domain.

The only difference is the scope. Mathematics is a purely deductive system. Starting from a finite set of axioms, every single equation you see is logical consequence. A ‘proof’ is just the set of steps required to reduce your statement to axiomatic bedrock. This has a huge advantage, math is the only epistemic system that grants conclusivity. Any theorem you see is guaranteed to be true. However, there is a tradeoff. Mathematics has a tiny scope, it can’t say anything about the reality outside of the system. Of course, it's inspired by reality, but the second you step out-of-bounds you lose the guarantees that make math so great

Science is a little bigger. It loosens the threshold of truth by allowing inductive reasoning. This buys us the ability to make statements about a much larger class of phenomena. However, these statements can never be fully proven. There will always be statistical uncertainty, scientific bias and poor reasoning, but the process of peer review largely takes care of this. Scientific knowledge converges to truth, which is fortunately good enough to make vaccines and spacecraft.

Science is so profound because it’s the sweet spot of truth and scope, but we can (and should) go farther. Science will never be able to capture the essence of love and suffering and all the other allusive concepts that make us human. 

Enter Humanities. A piece of art can’t say anything precise, and are seldom about anything concretely true. However, it is the only system we have to articulate the messy and nebulous ideas that describe human culture. Art, music, and literature are not just for entertainment, they are ontologies with the largest scope. In the end, artists make the same tradeoffs we do, and Finnegans Wake is the extremum. 

FW says nothing specific. It is 600 pages of vague, ambiguous metaphor. But that is a necessary cost for making the plot “Everything”. Each word must be bent to cover surfaces and essences it was never meant to. The result is a hopelessly complicated network of words, one that only one man will ever understand in its totality.

I’ll leave you with a puzzle: Who is closer to James Joyce... David Hilbert or Kurt Gödel?

Fun Facts:

•  The Polish Institute of Physics analyzed sentence structure in classic literature and found that the Wake is a perfect multifractal, barring truncation error (fractals are infinite)

• DB Weiss, Creator of the Game of Thrones HBO series, has a masters in Irish Lit. and wrote his thesis on FW.

• The word  'quark' (the elementary particle) was derived from FW: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!" (382)  Quarks come in 3's, so it fits...