Waywords and Meansigns: Recreating “Finnegans Wake” (In Its Whole Wholume) dir. by Derek Pyle (review)

Finnegans Wake has always had a strange relationship with its readers. On the one hand, Joyce’s final novel has become one of the richest topics of Joycean scholarly interest, but on the other, the book does not seem able to break away from its academic stigma, and “ordinary” readers still perceive it with great suspicion. Some recent non-academic projects have found new ways to disseminate the unique experience that the Wake can offer through the internet, thereby bringing the novel to readers in a seemingly less-disheartening form. The Twitter bot @finnegansreader posts fragments of text every ten minutes;¹ the “Wake in Progress” blog provides illustrations for several passages;² and other sites host the recording of Joyce reciting a fragment from Anna Livia Plurabelle at the Orthological Institute at Cambridge in 1929.³ These projects bring the Wake to a broader public in a nonacademic setting, and, more importantly, they make the Wake available and accessible to the public without restricting personal interpretations on the part of the reader/viewer/listener. This review focuses on one of the new projects in this context: “Waywords and Meansigns,” an initiative that seeks to draw on the Wake’s musicality.

“Waywords and Meansigns” is an online project that offers two free and unabridged editions of the Wake set to music.⁴ In the first edition’s seventeen tracks, the Wake is assembled into “31 hours, 8 minutes, 11 seconds worth of delightful strangeness” by a range of different performers, from professional musicians to artists or Wake-enthusiasts.⁵ The artists of “Waywords and Meansigns” give each chapter their own native or non-native English sound, as opposed to using only Joyce’s Hiberno-English Irish. Each track is therefore a unique and completely personal interpretation of an artist’s reading of the text and not in the least a simulation of Joyce’s 1929 Cambridge recording.

The different musical approaches per chapter provide variety, as some artists opt for a more traditional reading experience, clearly putting the text first, while others add an almost continuous flow of sound to their section. For example, the Massachusetts art-punk band Dérive produces a rap-like interpretation of Anna Livia Plurabelle; chapter I.4, “the Humphriad III,” is overlaid with experimental drum grooves; and chapter III.3 receives a veneer of jazz, electronica, and acoustic guitar riffs. In general, experimental is the best word to describe the type of music. Perhaps this is because the artists were aware that the Wake is an experimental form of writing; however, Finnegans Wake is difficult enough as it is, and, to be honest, some of these musical interpretations make it more inaccessible. The Anna Livia Plurabelle performance, for instance, seems to be out of sync with the flow of the text, which references numerous river names and relates to the female protagonist, who is also the River Liffey itself.

With that in mind, some parts of the Wake are obviously more suitable for a musical interpretation than others. The first section of chapter II.2, which, in 1937, was published as a separate pamphlet under the title Storiella As She Is Syung,⁶ is also performed in the “Waywords and Meansigns” version. Other chapters receive a more textual approach; the “Ondt and the Gracehoper” is primarily recited, for instance. In sum, it appears that “Waywords and Meansigns” emerges from both the perspective of the artists and that of the text. Looking into the textual approach in greater detail, two important questions can be raised: how true to Joyce’s text is “Waywords and Meansigns,” and what part do Joyce scholars play in the realization of the project.

Regarding this first question, the “Waywords and Meansigns” website states that the artists took into account only a few minimal requirements: “the chapter’s words must be audible, unabridged, and more or less in their original order.”⁷ The wording of...