This is part of a series of posts summarizing and quoting from books that were important to Plath, since I believe the majority of Plath fans today have not read them. If I get a lot of them down with good response, perhaps it’ll be another book.
James Joyce’s experimental novel, Finnegans Wake, is the last, most ambitious and most puzzling work of this author who wrote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners and Ulysses. As author/lecturer Terence McKenna says, “If Ulysses is Algebra, then Finnegans Wake is Differential Equations. Most of us break down at Algebra. Few of us aspire to go on…”
Above: Planning pages from James Joyce’s sketchbook for Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake is linguistically dense, with over 63,000 words and has been called one of the most difficult books in the English language. McKenna explains that this book has a language all its own, and the reader must gain a facility for it. A few pages in, one knows whether they want to do the work or not. Plath was certainly up for it, even without the technological advantage we have today of lots of great websites today to help one along (I recommend this one). Joyce makes up words and merges Gaelic and slang for the ride of one’s life, full of inside-jokes, political and social commentary, and, oh yeah, did I mention Qabalah?
Maybe you’ve seen this famous diagram of Finnegans Wake, diagrammed by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in 1946, which positions the novel ( at first I wrote “story,” but one can’t really call it that), its characters, main events, and how it is cast upon Qabalah (See the word ‘Cabalistic’ six words down on the far left, between Mythological and Biblical):
Every word in Finnegans Wake is transparent, and we see through it to older meanings, other sounds, puns and feelings. The book has a great dependence on sound, and is actually easier to understand when it is heard rather than read. In a June 12, 1954 letter Plath wrote Gordon Lameyer, who according to Plath was “a joyce fanatic,” (LSP, 563) she talks of listening to a record of its reading, but in a Joycean voice playing with the language (See my earlier blog on this record she listened to).
“hearing our father (allah, dada, etc.)…you know…lilt along aloud about anna livia and the hitherandthithering waters…” Plath continued, “I begin to wonder whether I am admiring symbols of idols, or idylls of cymbals,…(oh, “gather behind me, satraps,”)…simply, I understand joyce better for the hearing of you…” (LSP, 762-3)
In my book, Decoding Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” I discuss “The Freudian Finnegans Wake” and how Plath riffed off of Joyce writing about her father in her journals (DSPD, 68-9), much of this to find its way into the “Daddy” poem. In Decoding Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” I explore the concept of family drama in Joyce’s military-historical terms (DSPLL, 98-100). In the great tradition of Literary Alchemy, James Joyce wanted to create a book that created “space-time in a nutshell.” It is all that was, is, and will be. If the universe were to be destroyed, Joyce said, he wanted Finnegans Wake to be the map to rebuild it. A lofty goal, to be sure.
Plath’s Study of Joyce
Plath started getting into reading Joyce in early 1953, just before her infamous Mademoiselle summer. She chose to audit a class on the author and considered him then as a topic for her thesis (LSP, 583). Perhaps James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, or Qabalah itself, was part to blame for putting Plath over the edge? Plath knew that she was biting off more than she could chew academically. In July 1953, she asked her then-boyfriend Gordon Lameyer about his reading technique and management of notes, and she questioned whether writing a thesis on Joyce was even plausible. “I thought so before I began outside reading—now I wonder.” (LSP, 645-6) By December of that year, she told friend Eddie Cohen that she’d given up as she “hadn’t even read Ulysses thru thoroughly once.” (LSP, 654-5)
The idea that Plath took Finnegans Wake on, much less that she would attempt a thesis on it, at twenty years old is rather unbelievable. The idea that she attempted this in less than a year after her first suicide attempt, her recovery with sickening insulin and brain-shaking electric convulsive therapy, and then months of having to relearn to read and write, is astounding.
Nevertheless, Plath didn’t give up on Joyce entirely, even if she did chuck the thesis. In March of 1954 she still referred to herself as a Joyce “devotee” (LSP, 709), among other writers.
Joyce as Plath’s Model
By January of 1956, Plath told her mother in a letter from Cambridge:
“The important thing is the aesthetic form given to my chaotic experience, which is, as it was for James Joyce, my kind of religion, and as necessary for me is [sic] the absolution of the printed word as the confession and absolution of a Catholic in church.” (LSP, 1090)
We know Plath consciously layered meaning in her work as Joyce did, at least since February 1954, when she explained to Gordon Lameyer her multiple meanings intended within her poem, “Dirge in Three Parts”:
“The first verse is supposed to derive from a small satire on Adam and Even [sic] in Eden combined with Alice-In-Wonderland and DP’s* in general. The second uses the fairytale Oz yellow-brick road to take the place of Dante’s road of life and the pilgrimage in Bunyan’s book. The third plays on the inexorable black magic of time passing, childhood dreams lost, and the final taste of inevitable death.” (LSP, 681)
*DP’s are displaced persons, or refugees.
Above, we have clear examples of myth, literature, history, and even a sense of alchemy. If you notice, referring back to the Qabalah diagram of the book, Joyce had his own autobiographical component too. I do not deny there is a confessional level to Plath–I never did. But how ridiculous to discount all other levels, which is what most of our leading scholars do. As I said at the Plath Symposium, I think of Plath’s poems like Wikipedia’s disambiguation, getting every possible reference out of a word. Only Plath’s brilliant mind did this without computers. Just as James Joyce did.
Plath’s annotations in the Portable James Joyce, held in the Lilly Library at Indiana University-Bloomington, are especially fascinating. In addition to comments about Carl Jung’s rational unconscious and collective myth, she underlined, “he evoked the past to illuminate the present,” in the editor’s introduction, as well as “Joyce has managed, by invoking an ancient myth, to conjure up a modern one.”
In another letter to Lameyer, Plath mused, “I sometimes wonder if it would be a human possibility to go beyond the ‘funferal’ with HCE [Joyce’s main character, Here Comes Everybody, among other names] and ALP [HCE’s wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle] as far as language is concerned, and the multifoliate meanings…” (LSP, 647) Without a doubt, Plath achieved this goal and went beyond. Her own multifoliate poems are evidence of this.
As I read through Finnegans Wake myself (and I am by no means finished yet), it enchanted me enough to cast it against and frame the notes of my trip to Ireland and the Plath Symposium with its style and structure. I found myself writing something far from a traditional conference recap. It will have to be considerably shorter, and at least slightly more readable. It is still in progress and may or may not see the light of day. We shall see what the Universe has in mind.
The next book I will review will be Joseph Campbell’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake. It was too much to put in here.