FINNEGANS Wake is considered to be among the most challenging works of the English literary canon - or complete gibberish depending on your point of view.
It was James Joyce’s parting literary shot, based on sleep and dreams. But rather than be a big zzzzzzz, its fans insist it has many "accessible elements", especially when read aloud.
Indeed, Anthony Burgess praised the book as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page”. Unlike his own A Clockwork Orange.
So out loud it will be read this Sunday afternoon. The Bluecoat is staging a Finnegans Wake jamboree to coincide with Joyce’s birthday on 2 February.
Dr. Frank Shovlin, senior lecturer of Irish Literature in English at the University of Liverpool, will consider Joyce's motivations in writing the 1924 book and will examine the ways in which it irked so many readers and lost Joyce several old friends and allies.
LOLs on every page,
according to Anthony BurgessActor Stephanie Greer will read three passages from Books One and Two of Finnegans Wake. Her performance will frame a discussion about the night-time themes of the book.
By the time you get to the grand finale, titled The Launderers Omissions, it’ll be ABC, easy as 123.
“Nathan Jones presents a circular re-reading of the final and first chapters, working with the book's status as a Mobius Strip with neither beginning nor end,” it says here.
“Using methods such as spell-check and autotranslate to glitch-redact this most fluid of texts, Nathan discovers a highly personal and modern lyric in its eddies. The work engages with previous avant-garde textual operations on Finnegans Wake, such as John Cage's 'mesostics', but in response to today’s convergence culture, uses the occasion of the re-reading to plug the book into a networked contemporary pulp literature and auto-fiction.”
Whatevs.
Lispn! James Joyce: Finnegans Wake, Sunday February 1, 2015 2pm, The Bluecoat, School Lane, L1. Free.
