Riverrun to Livvy: Lots of Fun Reading the First Page of James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake," by Bill Cole Cliett (review)

When first seeing the subtitle of Bill Cole Cliett's book on the Wake, one might momentarily think (as I did) of what Jacques Derrida made of "two words" from Finnegans Wake in his analytically baroque, fifteen-page essay on Joyce, writing, and laughter nearly thirty years ago.¹ What would Cliett do with the first twenty-four lines of Finnegans Wake in his book-length study? In three words, something completely different, and this passing reference to a catchphrase from Monty Python's Flying Circus, the British television comedy series of the late 1960s and early 1970s, is not only intentional but completely relevant, as will soon be apparent.²

Cliett's monograph represents "one common reader's attempt to tempt more readers into entering the amazing maze that is Finnegans Wake" (9). It is an "introduction for the adventurous, those unafraid to discover just how far out a literary work can go" (10). Further, it is Cliett's aim "to free Finnegans Wake from the confines of college English departments and put it into the hands and heads of everyday readers whom Joyce believed are capable of finding its perusal fun" (42). An elementary school teacher by profession, Cliett does not claim to be a scholar but "simply a literary layman in love with language and all that words can be made to do" (13). He has read a lot, and his text is laced with references to and quotations from dozens of writers, among them Arthur Schopenhauer, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Shakespeare, Ezra Pound, Philippe Sollers, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Umberto Eco, and more—and that is just in the first twenty pages of the book. In addition, Cliett frequently cites Tom Robbins's Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates,³ a novel strewn with passing references to Finnegans Wake, in the epigraphs with which he prefaces each chapter. This indiscriminate mélange of both high-brow and low-brow extratextual references tells readers much about the spirit of Cliett's enterprise: to read Finnegans Wake "the way Joyce wanted the world to read it" (277).

Cliett's analysis of the Wake's first page is astute and comprehensive, although it draws almost exclusively on the wealth of secondary material that has been produced over the past half-century. More important for the author's avowed purpose, however, Cliett leverages the thematic density and scope of Joyce's opening page to introduce to new readers all of the major characters and most of the prominent themes and motifs of the Wake, including HCE, ALP, Shem, Shaun, Issy, Kate, the rainbow girls, Vico, St. Patrick, Tristan and Isolde, Buckley and the Russian General, Butt and Taff, Mutt and Jeff, thunder, the letter, and the hundred-letter words—to name just a few. Although his close scrutiny of the first page of the Wake constitutes the primary aim of his study, Cliett also presents the kind of introductory and background material one would expect to find in a Wake primer: information on Joyce's life and other works; how Joyce came to write Finnegans Wake (and how Cliett came to read it); the text's "nat language" (FW 83.12), including commentary on Joyce's liberal use of puns and portmanteau words; a review of the Wake's initial reception; and the role that the "university professors who put out scholarly explanations of Joyce's books by the boatload" play in the "team sport" of reading the Wake (41, 309). There is a chapter on the circularity of the Wake ("The Tao of 'The'"); a twelve-page exegesis of the Wake's two-word title that serves as a kind of warm-up for Cliett's main exercise; and a chapter on the "physics" of the Wake in which the author, who jokingly confesses not...