Trying the Wake

Michael Chabon on attempting to read Finnegans Wake. At the New York Review:

I got my first real glimpse of that beast in the Burger Chef restaurant that used to occupy the basement of the Cathedral of Learning, at the University of Pittsburgh, in my senior year, when a classmate in Josephine O’Brien Schaefer’s Ulysses seminar tossed a paperback copy across our table and dared me to open it to any page and make head or tail of what I found there. At that moment I was feeling surprisingly equal to the challenge. Under the captaincy of Professor Schaefer I had sailed undiscouraged between the wandering rocks of Ulysses, clear through the book’s later chapters, in which sense and intention lay in ambush and rained flaming arrows of rhetoric on us as we rowed madly past them. So it was with a traveled optimism that I accepted my friend’s throw-down that morning, opened the book to its first page, and wondered, as readers around the world have done since 1939, at the problem posed by its first sentence, with its beautiful first word. A word unprecedented, enigmatically uncapitalized, with a faintly Tolkienesque echo, to my nerdish ear, of Rivendell and Rohirrim.1 Indented and dangling, mid-page, mid-sentence, a sentence twisting like an inchworm from its filament:

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