Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake

by John Bishop

“Joyce’s Book of the Dark gives us such a blend of exciting intelligence and impressive erudition that it will surely become established as one of the most fascinating and readable Finnegans Wake studies now available.”—Margot Norris, James Joyce Literary Supplement

Genres: Literary Criticism, Literature, Nonfiction, Irish Literature, Criticism, Collections

496 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

John Bishop is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly erudite, Bishop's reading of Finnegans Wake is itself quite an undertaking. In his quest to demonstrate some of the primary currents that flow through Joyce's most inaccessible masterpiece (which I am still crawling though page by page), Bishop touches on such themes as: the body of the dreamer as both a geography (Ireland and Europe in the 30s) and a dreamography with fascinating illustrations), the ideas Joyce gleaned from Vico's The New Science and the Egyptian Book(s) of the Dead, and the use of vision and hearing in FW. The author channels the text like a spiritual medium from cover to cover demonstrating a passionate mastery of the text that is bewildering. I preferred this to The Skeleton Key although it was harder to read, the page numbers did correspond with those of my Oxford Press copy of FW.

My primary takeaway from Bishop is that FW is to Ulysses what Night is to Day and that - like, say, Bach's Musical Offering - it offers a mind-bending density of linguistic, historical, and cultural references that are nearly impossible to track precisely as one is reading the Wake. Rather, Bishop seems to suggest that we board the "topped head" of HCE for a unique and confusing adventure sure that we will land right where we began.

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being that this non-review has garnered a few newer "likes", owing to the increased interest shown around GR for FW in general, I feel I ought to amend it so that it reflects things as they stand now, June 4, 2014. I have completed a first thorough reading of Finnegans Wake, so that contradicts immediately the first sentence in the original review below. Much has changed about the sentence in parentheses also, as at present I couldn't give a shit less about anything approaching a "somewhat normal social life" when compared to the sheer joy and overwhelming aesthetic pleasures offered by FW. The third (or second, depending on how you count) sentence stands, but should be read as a statement of admiration. The first clause of the fourth (or third) sentence still stands, but the end clause should be amended to read "AND enjoyability and a nominal but satisfying amount of comprehension by this reader." The last sentence can be expunged entirely.

Joyce famously said that Finnegans Wake will keep the professors busy for centuries, and 75 years later his prognostication seems to be playing out. Most of us are still skirting around the edges of Finnegans Wake scholarship; Campbell's skeleton key, McHugh's annotations, and this fascinating book of Bishop's being among the handful of readily available major studies of Joyce's infinite text. It is up to us, our generation, to take up the mantle and to burrow farther into the mountain, to renew the investigation, to reinvigorate the scholarship, to keep Joyce's "machine for making meanings" well-oiled and fueled and chugging and churning out exegesis and pure reading pleasure for the century newly unfolding. Because in so many ways the Wake-language is relevant to and reflects our epoch as much as the one in which it was composed. There will never be another Joyce, thus never another Finnegans Wake, but its shadow falls long and touches all serious works of literature that follow it. Take up Bishop, take up Campbell, take up McHugh, take up all those that have wanted to spread the good gospel of HCE, ALP, Shem, Shaun and Issy (including our modest Finnegans Wake Grappa here in this electric innernet community), and push things on, make your own contributions, for Finnegans Wake, despite all its obscurities, is truly accessible to everyone. Bishop's book is yet another of Kate's keys dangling from a far too poorly populated ring. As one of our dear champions of this text, Nathan "NR" Gaddis, has said, Ulysses was the book of the 20th century; Finnegans Wake will be the book of the 21st.

There are few books written that are inexhaustible, whose secret depths might never be brought into light, that offer more than an individual reader might uncover in a lifetime of study. Thus FW encourages, more than any book I know, collaborative efforts at unpacking, communal reading, shared knowledge, the bliss of intermutual artistic revelation. Take up Finnegans Wake, sing this song-language of the Cosmos into all ears that will hear.


~~

Original scribble:

I really enjoy reading books about Finnegans Wake, but I'll probably never actually read Finnegans Wake from beginning to end (I do wish to lead a somewhat normal social life, after all). Joyce, you selfish son of a bitch. The 5 stars this one gets is for ambition and execution, not enjoyability or comprehension. I mean, I haven't read Finnegans Wake through, so how could I know if what Bishop is saying is total bullshit or not?

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

What is it like? Reading John Bishop’s Joyce’s Book of the Dark is like reading Finnegans Wake with that table round of old men reading one page together per week for seven years and at the end of that seven years rearriving to begin again to finnagain to funagain.

In aurther words, this is not a dry academic thang that kills the text in the name of knight=mastery, but this is reading with an old man who has become A Child Again because as A Child Again one learns to read again and to read proper again. And do you know why I love Dirty Old Men like Joyce and like Federman do you? It’s because they’ve become Fun Again and all the scolding in the world from the yung’uns won’t keep them from making yet again another Dick Joke or Jane Yoke.

These men don’t look dirty, but I bet if you give them the right paragraph or even a Left Paraphraph from the Wook o’ the Wake they’d able themselves to riff with the rest of the riff-raff best of ‘em. Here’s Reading Wake in Switzerland with Old Men :: The Joycean Society. ....-;)--.;; That clip proovides only a querblick. Sorries sillies.

Bishop’s not really a Dirty Old Man. But it helps to have a tooch of Dirty Old Man in you (no, not like that! get your mind out of the gut’er) to read The Wake, I mean, to read Joyce. But no really, now that you’re totally distracted thinking about Dirty Old Men like Finnegan (again!) I just wanted to say that Bishop’s Book here about Joyce’s Book there is not one of those “academic” “criticisms” that will tell you whether Joyce’s Bok is good or bad (in the space of 400 pages of pages) but it’s like reading a book with another reader -- and this reader is so-so smart that you can now not but help to say, OMG that makes sooo much sense!

Syllabus, works for requit, in dat or’dor ::
Finnegans Wake ; OUP edition required, The Restorted optional
McHugh’s Annytittle-tations
John Bishop’s Book about James Joyce’s Bookery of the Dark
Cambell-Robinson’s Skeleton Key -- avoid pretty much unless you are still jung and inadequately freuden’d, (ever use a skeleton key? they never work.)
Beckett’s thing in Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress ; not to be missed.
Freud’s thing on Dream Interpretation.
Vico’s book.
Membership card with dues up-to-date in The Grappa group (highly recommended, alone for the wonderful souls who abide there)

[Ed Smiley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is by far the best treatment of Finnegans Wake I have ever read. I am very thankful for a dear friend for sending me a copy!

Finnegans Wake is not for everyone (even though it is about everyone), and therefore a book of literary criticism about what is arguably the most difficult book ever written is not for everybody too.

So, yeah, this review is for those people, and maybe the insatiably curious seeking literary curios. So before I review it, let me lay my cards on the table. I'm not a professor or anything like that, I've read Wake more than once, I'm a fan of Joyce, and I have read, as well couple of standard works. If I throw in quotes, they're from Wake, from memory; ain't no scholar, got it?

So, first off, imagine how suprising it is to hear a critic approach a literary work (or any work of art) by trying to sympathetically understand the author's intentions, which for some interpreters are highly problematic in the first place.

John Bishop, takes off from Joyce's selfdeclared intention to write a book about the night, the darkened mind, the dreamed world, and uses it to crossexamine and crosssection the mind of the dreamersubject that Joyce has created in Wake, who, like Humpty Dumpty has fallen, cracked, and not even fully bodyaware, his "humptyhillhead" and his "tumpytumtoes", and the needful obscurity and ambiguity of such a tale "retaled early in bed and later in life." Our hero is as helplessly inert as a corpse in a "seematary" as he dissolves into "every body" and "very biddy", and the hapless reader is hapless precisely because he comes to the book with linear expectations that are as thwarted as the hero's effort to make sense of dreamsense. Such is the beginning of Bishop's analysis, through which he threads the Egyptian Book of the Dead (the underworld as a kind of dream, the bream as a kind of death), the best explanation of Wake's relation to Vico's New Science (kids, it's not just cyclical history, it is the mind waking to conscious through language!), the infantile and interuterine states of consciousness, and the bloodmusic of his "cutletsized consort" pulsing though his eardrums, a "mamafesta" proclaiming the continuance of life (the Gaelic word for the river Liffey) "forriver."

What this book is not, is a territorial guide like Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake where Campbell and Robinson lead you with machetes, whacking away at the luxuriant linguistic overgrowth, and leaving a bare but discernible trail of myth and narrative, nor a en(t)omological one like Tindall's Reader's Guide where he euthanizes punwords pinned in attractive butterflycases. The map is not the territory, oh boy. This is more of a work in parallel in which he crossections the whole book on the basis of themes; this requires nice judgement, to avoid projecting an interpretation into a book that is endlessly evocative, and he is up to the task.

[Mesoscope · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried to like this book, and there are bits that I found quite valuable, but on the whole I have to conclude it's untenable. I have two primary objections, one interpretive and the other stylistic.

First and foremost, I reject the book's central interpretation, which I would describe as a strong reading of the dream hypothesis. That is, in Bishop's view this is ultimately and absolutely a book about HCE, who lies asleep in his inn and restlessly recreates various dynamics and events from his life. This is a counter-position to the mythopoetic reading popularized, for example, in Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key, which, instead of emphasizing the universality of his themes, focuses on sleep and dream imagery, and on the book's various devices and techniques as distortions brought on by semi-obliviated consciousness.

I find that entirely unconvincing, in part because of my own conviction that this whole dream business is primarily an interpretive device that Joyce uses to allow him to do what he wants, which is to delight at genius wordplay, and to enter more deeply into an exploration of the symbol-using mind. As Joyce put it:

"(Stoop) if you are abcdedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations. Tieckle. They lived und laughed ant loved end left."

This kind of thing is untouched by the strong dream hypothesis. And what does he do with the fact that in one chapter, HCE wakes up? The language does not change.

Perhaps more importantly, I don't personally believe the Wake represents Joyce's attempt to reconstruct sleep-consciousness in any simple sense, because nothing in it resembles any dream. Dreams express themselves in images. The images may not make sense, but they appear clearly to the inner eye. But there is scarcely one sentence in Joyce's Wake that can be visualized at all.

Bishop's close readings are often simply false, such as when Bishop explicitly rejects Campbell's reading of the voice of God in the thunder sounding with Finnegan's fall. There may be no fact about the book more clearly established, as anyone with a token familiarity with Joyce's use of Vico's historical cycle will know. Vico's aeon begins with the sound of God's judgement ringing through the thunderclap. For this reading of the Wake we have no less of an authority than Samuel Beckett, writing under the guidance of Joyce himself.

He left me with enough head scratchers of this kind that I began to question his common sense.

My other primary gripe - the stylistic complaint - is that he engages in a tedious tactic I'll describe as "arguing through concordance." That is, to advance his interpretation, he constantly strings together sentences composed largely of Joyce's neologisms, plucked willy-nilly from the book in its entirety, as if to imply by piecing them together without context or rationale will justify his readings.

To pick a sample at random:

"That big 'blank memory' that we have all 'recoil[ed]' from 'our own nighttime,' after all, did not simply vanish when night did; the roomily 'hole affair' lingers on vexingly, now, very much on our present minds."

The entire book is composed in this fashion. It's wearisome stuff that says very little, because context is everything in the Wake.

[Harry Collier IV · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book shall forever haunt me. It has so many great 5-star reviews and I JUST DON'T GET IT!
I mean I have tried and tried but I find most of his findings so far off the mark and his assertations to being correct is mind-boggling.
Finnegans Wake (more than any other work of art ever) is open to interpretation and I feel that Bishop doesn't allow the reader to form any opinions other than his own.
I feel he is attempting to solidify FW. To make it less fluid and more exact for the reader. His goal with this book is to add meaning to a work that begs for the reader to make his own meaning.
The worst part is that everyone else seems to have bought into this. Reading it and disagreeing with at least one thing on every page I began to think that perhaps I had the problem. I questioned my own findings in FW. I put it down for a few months or even a year and then I pick it back up because "maybe I missed something."
I am finally putting this to rest and concluding that I just did not like it. I don't like his style. And I don't like his premise.
And yes... a few months or even a year from now I will undoubtedly see this book on my shelf and look it up on GR again and think I should give it another go.
I am writing this review to my future self to remind him that THIS IS NOT THE BOOK FOR YOU!

[Bob R Bogle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was excited when I found a copy of John Bishop's book Joyce's Book of the Dark, Finnegans Wake because it is one of the most praised books about James Joyce's final literary work. Furthermore, people I know and whose opinions I respect have praised Bishop's book, sometimes exuberantly. I regret therefore that the time has come for me to write these few lines about Bishop's book, which I do not find to be so praiseworthy.

I was somewhere about half way through Bishop's extraordinarily repetitious book when it occurred to me that part of the trouble I was having with it stems from the fact that it's not written like a book. Reading Bishop isn't a normal reading experience at all. Instead, Bishop's book comes across as if you're hearing an obsessive professor lecturing on Finnegans Wake, only he's not really lecturing: mostly he's riffing on Finnegans Wake, pontificating exactly the way you'd expect a professor lecturing about his favorite book at the front of the class to do. Recognizing this made my reading easier and more satisfying, but only a little bit.

Bishop's thesis is simple enough: he asks that we take James Joyce literally and view Finnegans Wake as an account of a person asleep. Bishop certainly gives us plenty of support for his case, although how odd it is to hear a professor of literature argue that fiction ― and in particular fiction written by James Joyce, of all people! ― should be read literally and not figuratively or metaphorically. Not that I find fault with Bishop's thesis, but the argument is curious.

(I don't think Bishop's interpretation of Finnegan's Wake is the end-all, either. He puts forward a good case. Plenty of others can, and have, presented good cases, too. In the end, Bishop's point of view is one point of view: no less, but no more.)

Some passages in Bishop stand out for special interest, in my opinion. First among these is the chapter about the Egyptian book of the dead. The reader is able to learn a good deal here about Egyptology and how it applies to Finnegans Wake. This moment of clarity stands out in contrast against most of the rest of the book. When I read a book about James Joyce or his works, I do so because I'm interested in fresh insights into the man and his books that I haven't had before. In Joyce's Book of the Dark Bishop seldom illuminates Joyce or Finnegans Wake: he mostly pours more darkness on what is already an obscure subject. As a reader I have to wonder: Why am I reading this at all, if not for enlightenment but for only continuing endarkenment?

Speaking for myself, the experience of struggling with Bishop's book was a great, very long, tedious disappointment. Given the choice of hearing an enthusiast spend 479 pages raving about Finnegans Wake or reading 628 pages of Finnegans Wake itself, by myself, trying to work it out on my own, maybe bringing along a few boon companion authors who prefer to throw light on the subject, I'll choose the latter approach.

[Anastasia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Finnegans Wake is--and probably should be--a daunting task. The classic advice on the subject, read anything aloud that you do not understand, can only take us so far when we don't have the same incredible mastery of languages and ideas that Joyce posessed. Of all the books that I consulted during my own journeys through Finnegans Wake, Joyce's Book of the Dark is by far the best at shedding light on the subject while being in its own way a worthwhile read. This is more than a collection of footnotes and annotations: this is a book that not only helps us understand Finnegans Wake, but also gives insight into why it's worth taking on the task.

[Michael Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greatest book on the Wake (yes yes, I've not read them all, but I find it highly unlikely that another one as good as this will come along). Finally, a book which provides a guide to *enjoying* Joyce's second masterpiece, as opposed to uncovering the meaning of everything word-by-word. Now I love to do that too, but people need to know that this book is to be, first and foremost, enjoyed.

[Josh Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's so much here, a proper review would require a chapter-length disquisition. I'll just include one comment: this book's greatest success is in establishing a direct connection between Finnegans Wake and that ever-so-trendy theoretical construct "the body." It firmly establishes that the book is best read as a representation of a body sleeping. My only real quarrel with that is that at times. Bishop wants to say it is only that. That doesn't seem right. Yes - there are many entry points into meaning gained by thinking seriously about ears, eyes, blood, the body as a whole... But it seems forced to say that somehow the whole is captured in that observation. We don't have a great reason, for example, to see why the broad swath of human history is all injected in here if this is a book of one body on one night. I would say Bishop has shored up one side of a dichotomy that other critics have ignored, but he has too stridently shored up that side, so we might then miss the other.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since I haven't yet tackled Finnegan's Wake (recently), I'm going to hold off on the five star rating until I've read it and know how useful this text really was.

That said--Bishop works with broad themes that present themselves throughout the text, rather than doing a linear "translation" of Joyce's enigmatic book. Having some familiarity with Finnegan's Wake already helped to me understand where he was going with most of his ideas; now I'll see if that's reciprocal.

[Derek Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this one up from the library, but only got about 1/4 the way through it before I had to hand it back in. It hadn't yet unlocked much of the meaning of FW yet, but it did demonstrate how particular themes, such as HCE the sleeping giant, keep recurring and getting referenced again and again throughout the book. I plan to pick it up again later and finish it.

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fact that I never owned this book baffles me now even more than it did the first time I picked this up, while experiencing Finnegans Wake. I spent a long afternoon with this one at the library today, and will return to spend a couple more hours with it tomorrow. When I am not dead broke and practically starving to death, definitely going to purchase.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Joyce reportedly said that Finnegans Wake is a work that would "keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant." He also suggested that the Wake is a book that is to be read over and again - with its nonlinear narrative, starting in the middle of a sentence and ending in the middle of the same one, the book can very likely be picked up and consumed from any page (not unlike Burroughs' Naked Lunch in this regard). Once one enters the Wake it's difficult to leave, it stays with us for all time (because although perhaps the story of a single dreamer, it's also the story of all us - Here Comes Everybody); even if we set it down for some time, vowing not to return to it we are forever weaved in the fabric of the dream that is the Wake.

I bought this book as I was finishing up with the Wake a couple years back and intended to read it then, but with Tindall and Burgess already as guides, I didn't feel that there was room for another guidebook (though I would have probably made room for Campbell's Skeleton Key had it been readily available). But two years later, having vowed that I was done with the Wake, I found myself drawn to this work for some unknown reason. What John Bishop does here is explore in depth the dark, the night, the sleep, the dream, the body of the dreamer, and other related elements in Joyce's "Book of the Dark," using Joyce's letters to shape his theories, and tying in lengthy and fascinating discussions of works like the Egyptian Book(s) of the Dead, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and, of course, Vico's The New Science.

There are times when Bishop's points feel a bit hard to swallow, as often happens with literary scholarship and fan theories, but then Bishop proceeds to offer such compelling justification that I found myself as reader coming around to see his point of view and finding that my doubt was perhaps not completely alleviated, but certainly diminished. Filled with fascinating etymological charts and fun word play, Bishop's study of Joyce is, unlike so many scholarly analyses, a pleasure to read and I find myself now almost compelled to pick up the Wake/i> again f0r another round. Almost.

[Michael Linton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a HEAVY book. It goes into great detail about how FW is written in a dream state. I mean very detailed by picking out specific words and phrases and what it's like to sleep. It was worth reading because it helped me understand FW better. But I doubt I would read it again or recommend it.

[Big Hard Books & Classics · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very scholarly book, indeed. Bishop's Edition of Finnegans Wake is also my favorite ... bigger boarders and more room for annotations 😁

[Paul Nagy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A decidedly twigs on the limbs of individual trees in the thick forest of the Wake. Helpful and dull as it shows how to unpack some few levels of this circler multidimensional dream of civilization yessing life.

[in8 · Rating 3 out of 5]

engaged w/ it here: http://www.5cense.com/15/459.htm