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James Joyce
Andrew Ferguson
LET'S PLAY FINNEGANS WAKE

Whatever else Finnegans Wake might be (and there is nothing it might not be), James Joyce's final novel is a playful book, in its language, with all its puns, portmanteaus, and thunderwords; in its structure, with its overall circularity, and formal gambits such as the quiz in I.6, or the annotated lesson in II.2; and in its relationship to its readers, with its encouragement to chart one's own path through the book. It is even, perhaps especially, a book of play in Derrida's sense, in its looseness, in the room for negotiation in all its terms.

As such it is less a book to be read than it is to be played. And it has been so since its earliest fragments were being published as “A New Unnamed Work” in Two Worlds or “Work In Progress” in transition: in particular, Joyce made a game of having readers guess what the title of the finished volume would be (and was crestfallen, not to mention badly out of pocket, when transition editor Eugene Jolas supplied the correct answer). This play is often collaborative: the reading history of the Wake is filled with examples of readers working together to better their collective understanding of the book, from the initial volume Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress compiled by Samuel Beckett, to the letters exchanged by Thornton Wilder and Adeline Glasheen that led to the latter's Census volumes, to the Finnegans Wake Newslitters circulating potential advances in interpretation, to the Finnegans Web or the Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury of the present day aiming to annotate and elucidate the entire work. Likewise, perhaps no other novel is so conducive to being read or even play-acted in a group setting; some such groups, such as the Wake group hosted by Fritz Senn at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, have met regularly for several decades now. In his article “Finnegans Wake for Dummies,” Sebastian Knowles even suggests that beginners approach the Wake as if it learning a sport; specifically, a “ski-slope” method (100) starting on the bunny slopes of I.5, and working one’s way up to the black diamond of II.3.

But a newly emergent media format provides a still better comparison: the videogame Let's Play, or LP. Originally emerging around 2004 as a means of remembering childhood games such as Oregon Trail, the form quickly developed into a highly varied genre, including everything from collective playthroughs to straightforward how-tos and parodies to technical breakdowns, either as a series of screenshots with accompanying text, video capture with a commentary track, or a mix of both. Depending on the style and level of detail, LPs could span months, even years of engagement with a single text - and they could just as easily burn out and be abandoned after only a few sessions. And, as implied by the first person plural in Let’s Play, the form is collective and collaborative; even if only one player is playing the game in question, still she is playing it for an audience of some size, and beyond that for the entire group of gamers with an interest in that game. Such groups are interpretive as well as imaginative communities: each new discovery made about a game-text propagates throughout that community - first by postings in Internet forums, most often today on live web feeds and archived video on the Twitch platform - and increases the interpretive facility with which any player can navigate that text.

Among the most common types of gameplay featured in LPs are several with particular parallels to Wake readings. For instance, there is the speedrun, which attempts to strip a game down to only those elements absolutely required for completion. In games, this leads to the completion of the original Super Mario Bros. in less than 5 minutes;

In the Wake, it leads to plot summaries and attempts at "shorter versions" or "skeleton keys" such as Joseph Campbell's. On the other end, there are 100% completion runs where the player attempts to defeat every single level or collect every item, such as catching every Pokemon. While this is surely impossible in Wakean terms, there are nonetheless attempts at exhaustive explication such as FWEET or the Manual for the Advanced Study of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in one hundred volumes organized by George Sandulescu and Lidia Vianu. (Naturally they found that, even at 26,000 pages, it wasn’t enough, so they have pushed ahead with volumes 101 and 102 since). On the other hand are such practices as the “developer’s walkthrough,” a sort of feasibility demonstration (recently theorized by Nathan Altice), in which the designer plays a very few select minutes of a work in progress for an elite trade-show audience who are likely to buy the full product when it is completed and released - very similar to Joyce’s strategy in publishing fragments from the Wake up to 15 years before publication of the novel.

Such examples could be multiplied, but I will focus here on a mode of gameplay known as “glitching.” Players engaging in this practice are seeking to exploit programming errors and oversights (in either the software or the hardware) to gain some sort of advantage in the game. Often this is a competitive advantage, allowing for enhanced abilities such as gaining infinite ammunition, or super speed. But many glitchers care less about winning the game on its own terms than they do about finding places where the structure of the game weakens, or can be made to break down entirely.

LPers approach videogames in much the same way as a parkour runner does a city or campus: looking for alternate routes to traverse that space, even (or especially) those unanticipated by the original designers. Such a runner is called a “traceur,” both one who hurries, but also literally one who leaves a trace - the mark of a reader traversing the terrain of the text; both Derrida and Paul Ricoeur, in differing ways, made use of this concept of a trace (in the context of parcours, or a “pathway”) in laying out their models of interpretation. Such textual navigation is at the heart of any exegesis, as the reader acrobatically leaps from one textual block to another, seeking to forge connections between seemingly disparate parts of a work.

Glitching alters this practice somewhat, because it reveals the instability of the terrain beneath one’s feet. It’s more a form of meta-play: as deconstruction does with the logos, glitching foregrounds the gaps in the code that produces the video-game environment, radically destabilizing the game. This can lead to effects such as walking through walls, short-circuiting plot events, even entering spaces where the game’s normal ontological conditions are suspended.

Credit: sydlexia.com

Finnegans Wake, where all spaces are permeable, all plots may be skipped entirely, and all ontologies are in flux, works very similarly to a glitched game. Even the actual representations of games in the novel are strangely corrupted: the “quiz” chapter, I.6 - which Sean Latham argues “marks the point where [Joyce] stops writing a novel and starts crafting a game” - follows a seemingly mundane structure of questions and answers, somewhat akin to the catechistic approach in “Ithaca.” But where that episode breaks down at its end, with Bloom falling asleep, there’s something off about the Wake quiz from the start, a radical disjunction such that question 1 is a single sentence 13 pages long, with the answer “Finn MacCool!”, and question 11, a “mere” paragraph in length, draws an answer of some 19 pages, including the interpolation of a previously separate fable, “The Mookse and the Gripes,” drawn weirdly into the orbit of the quiz. Even the less verbose questions seem broken in some way; knowing question 12 in its entirety:

12. Sacer esto?
Answer: Semus sumus! (168.12-13)

provides little help for those playing along at home, and is cryptic even for readers with an extensive knowledge of the rest of the book. In fact, the knowledge that the quiz is meant to provide, as R.J. Schork writes, an “expansive introduction” to “the principal characters and primary precincts of the action” (125) may actually incite the reader: introductions are meant to clarify, or at least to provide context, yet in a book notorious for its obscurity, this introductory quiz makes matters murkier, while also asking readers to join in the absurd exercise of an impossible guessing game.

Latham recasts the quiz in videogaming terms, comparing the experience of the quiz to the acquisition of items, such as keys or ships, that make the text easier to navigate. This is literally true in the case of the sigla that Joyce used to denote character or idea complexes in his work: HCE, Anna Livia, Shem, Shaun, Issy, and all the rest. (These sigla, incidentally, would work quite well as a sequence of videogame powerup symbols.)

Credit: rosenlake.net

Genetic critics have shown how often Joyce used these sigla separately or in combination as prompts for further composition, with the twins, for instance, sometimes shown combined, as if two aspects of the same figure, or perhaps both facets of the encompassing HCE, while Issy is sometimes twinned by her own reflection, allowing her to play dual or further multiple roles throughout the novel. Considered in terms of its sigla, the book has remarkably few characters; however, the boundaries and alliances between them are always in flux: at a fundamental level they too are glitched.

In II.1, the “Nightgames” chapter, the three children play another doomed guessing game, with Shem (playing the role of “Glugg”) required to guess the color of Issy’s underpants while she and her friends jeer him for every wrong guess, and shower praise on Shaun (or “Chuff”). Shem finds himself in a position familiar to many a player of the Wake: trying to pin down a single answer within the swirl of hundreds or millions of possibilities. And the confusion of characters doesn’t help matters: “He was feeling so funny and floored for the cue, all over which girls as he don’t know whose hue. [...] no geste reveals the unconnouth. They’re all odds against him, the beasties. Scratch. Start.” (227.23-28). If he can’t even identify which one is Issy, how can he hope to seize upon her color - much less such an obscure color as the apparent answer, heliotrope?

As he laments later on, pleading for them to “Lift the blank ve veered as heil!,” he can see that color only as absence, as a “sight most deletious” (247.20; 30-1). There are clues to this “true” answer sprinkled throughout the text, as when the gaggle of girls are addressed as “O holytroopers” (223.11) or when ritual ablution is referred to as “the holiodrops” (235.5). But even if, as Sam Slote says, “Shem is surrounded by the name of the color that he is blind to in his guesses” (189), that doesn’t help unless he is able to read the text in which he himself is constituted - and even so, it would be possible, highly likely even, to read through and be unaware that such portmanteaus were clues to the chapter’s answer. If he, or any reader of the Wake, is to have any success, he must leave off the attempt to “finish” the game; after all, that would only loop him back around to the beginning again. Instead, he must he must seek out alternate methods of playing the game - specifically, he must learn to glitch the text.

Issy points toward this in terms that echo later computing terminology, when she sends Shem a message at once castigating and encouraging him: “Is you zealous of mes, brother? Did you boo moiety lowd? You suppoted to be the on conditiously reejected? Satanly, lade! Can that sobstuff, whingeywilly! Stop up, mavrone, and sit in my lap, Pepette, though I’d much rather not. Like things are m. ds. is all in vincibles. Decoded.” (232.21-26). That parting shot “decoded”/“decode it” is a taunt for a brother who has no hope of doing so; but beyond that it points to the deeper task: to “decode” not as in decipher, figuring out the one meaning of a message, but rather to take apart the code. “holytroopers” or “heliodrops” can act as hints for “heliotrope” - outer garments that, once removed, afford a glimpse of what’s beneath. But that inner layer is “a sight most deletious”; to reduce the portmanteaus solely to index fingers pointing at heliotrope is to delete most of the information embedded within them, and to close off any possibility of further linguistic emergence. It’s rather “heliotrope” that is the index, a repository of other phonic possibilities (and, as Slote points out, heliotrope is not just a purplish color, it is also a stone, a flower, and a movement towards the sun [189]; Margot Norris cited many further meanings in her drama-essay “Joyce’s Heliotrope”). The particular code being enacted has resulted in this particular game, but once that is de-coded, there is revealed the continual process of becoming out of which all such games emerge. As if to signal this, the game ends not with any one guess - though Shem is still without success - but with an instance of absolute linguistic possibility, the thunderword:

“Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertooryzooysphalnabortansporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapuk.” (257.27-28).

There is a complication here with the thunderword, and I’m going to approach it via parallels between the procedures of this chapter, and a mode of glitched gameplay in the 1986 Nintendo game Metroid.

Credit: geeksandgamersunite.com

In that game you play an intergalactic bounty hunter, Samus Aran, who must infiltrate an interplanetary pirate hideout and destroy biological weapons called “metroids”; this task required destroying the pirate boss Mother Brain and then escaping before the self-destruct timer runs out. The game was notable for many technical advances, in particular the possibility of scrolling not just to the right, as in Super Mario Bros., but also to the left. Metroid also featured a large, nonlinear world without any obvious timer pushing the player forward. This left time for players to explore the games’ many areas, made as distinct as NES technology would allow: fiery Norfair, sleek Tourian, etc. But long after everything about the game was thought to have been discovered, players using a glitching trick called the “Door Jump” that allowed the character to move inside the walls and into the spaces between rooms found entirely new and never-before-seen chambers, which were immediately dubbed the “secret worlds.”

Unlike other rooms in the game, these new chambers mixed graphical and gameplay elements from various areas, leading to theories about a hidden or never finished “hard mode” of the game. As the Metroid Database writes, “For a long time, nobody knew why the secret worlds were there - were they intentional? Was the game meant to be longer? Was it released in an unfinished state? Or were the areas nothing more than graphical glitches? [...] [they] turned out to be nothing more than extraneous map data left outside the normal ‘playing area’.” That is, the game usually keeps track of where the player is with a numerical counter to ensure that rooms are consistent within areas; however, using the Door Jump interferes with that check, so the data the game is trying to draw on is no longer valid. It is, like Shem should be, reading a blank - and this de-coded absence opens up data that, I would argue, are not “extraneous,” but rather essential. The “secret worlds” show Metroid in the process of becoming; they are the stuff out of which the actual game map emerges.

Credit: geeksandgamersunite.com

Given the memory and hardware limitations of the Nintendo, only so many permutations were possible; Joyce, on the other hand, is working with the entirety of human language and narrative. When Beckett wrote of the Wake that “Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read - or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself” (14), that something is a game continually in flux, so that in one guise the Wake is a great jumbled “secret world” of characters and places and language, out of which emerges all of the stories we tell about such things.

But that doesn’t solve the problem embedded in the thunderword: as a summons to leave off the game, it would seem to place a patriarchal, disciplinary boundary on how it might be played. In many ways, the thunderwords embody what Friedrich Kittler would come later to characterize as “Discourse Network 1800”: an education into language and citizenship via the syllables cooed and the penstrokes (like the sigla, perhaps) trained through the voice of a mother relegated solely to domestic duties and child-rearing. Such a network is, or attempts to be, self-perpetuating: as one generation inculcates the next, it controls the language through which the latter might attempt to mount any resistance. The procedure is oddly similar to Metroid where, however open the game, still there is the pull of the final objective: defeating the Mother Brain and escaping its hideout before the Metroid’s only explicit clock, a “time bomb,” runs out.

However, Metroid has been running another clock in the background all along, one measuring the player’s in-game time from start to finish. Even a player who finishes the game might not be aware of this timer, as its results are only communicated indirectly, in the game’s final screen. Take more than ten hours to finish, and Samus faces away from the player; finish in less than ten but more than five and Samus waves to the camera. Finish in less than five hours, though, and the game reveals its biggest secret: the body underneath the suit is presented as female - and still more so for faster finishing times, which reveal Samus in a leotard or even in a bikini.

Credit: metroid.wikia.com

This might appear to sexualize Samus in order to ensure her body remains available for male appropriation, a revelation which would risk reinscribing the discursive chain of transmission through which woman is imprinted by male cultural production so that she can in turn inculcate the next generation of male cultural producers. In this case Samus’s fight against the Mother Brain reflects the struggle of Discourse Network 1900 against its 1800 predecessor: to fail is to form another link in the discursive chain; to succeed, however, is to be conscripted into an order where “Women are no longer mothers and makers of meaning, but at best recorders and arrangers of temporarily meaningful noise” (Winthop-Young 71). Samus’s actions are an arrangement and recording of the controller buttons pressed by the player, inputs which become meaningful only in the temporary context of fulfilling the game’s objective - an electronic mediation of a biologically deterministic gender model.

Read through the lens of transgender studies, however, gender in Metroid proves more complex. Game director Yoshio Sakamoto admits that it was only partway though the development process that “one staff member said, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be kind of cool if it turned out that this person inside the suit was a woman?’” While in the suit, Samus is likely to be read as male, since the actions she undertakes - jumping, shooting, collecting quest items - were with very few exceptions reserved for male avatars, often in the course of rescuing passive female characters. Only at the end of the game (and not even then, for many players) is Samus “revealed” as female - and all that is revealed there is the contingency of gender. Danielle M. Seid writes of the “reveal” as a moment when a transgender individual is “subjected to the pressures of a pervasive gender/sex system that seeks to make public the ‘truth’ of the trans person’s gendered and sexed body [...] [it] can be seized upon by a trans person as a moment to exert agency and reveal oneself, to determine the meaning of one’s own life and body [...] such a ‘performance,’ or revealing rather than being revealed, frequently demands that trans persons continually reassert and defend their truth” (176).

What Samus reveals - and continually reasserts - is not a body unexpectedly occupying the opposite pole of a gender binary, co-opted to reinscribe the assumptions of the prevailing discourse, but rather a body representative of gender fluidity that destabilizes those assumptions, as well as the model of discourse in which they are embedded. Kittler’s discursive frameworks rely on symbolically and historically-constructed gender roles presumed to be mutually exclusive - but, as with the levels in Metroid, the elements in these constructs are never as stable or exclusive as they are made to appear. By performing the Door Jump and accessing the “secret worlds,” Samus glitches not only the game map but also the Discourse Networks, exploring the uncertain spaces out of which such configurations arise. In so doing, her body is revealed as another secret world, neither male nor female, nor any mix of the two; existing instead in a state prior to the construction of such exclusive gender identities or the teleological process required to arrive at them. Samus is trans, between gender, but also beyond and even before gender; her revelation undermines not only the assumptions of gamers brought up on gendered heroes, but also the discursive framework through which they relate to the game.

A similar revelation is available to Shem in the Wake, but he misses his chance by insisting on playing the guessing game by the strategies of Network 1800 - looking for the female voice of Nature (refracted here as the girls of the rainbow) to provide revelation, which will enable him to produce poetry (cf. Kittler 25-27). Were the discourse to function properly, the content of this message and the vision of the body would be one, and the process take the form of a closed loop, with the message of nature received and then amplified for future transmission. But language is not so easily controlled, in Wake or in life: the message is garbled; “heliotrope” comes through as “holytroopers”; Shem’s guesses fall short (225.21-7, 233.21-7), and his subsequently attempted verse (231.5-8) borders on Vogon poetry. The rules have shifted around him (or were never what he thought them to be in the first place), and he is slow to adapt. His initial series of guesses focus largely on natural phenomena, on the world as it appears: the first a series of minerals, the second on the visual spectrum (in particular yellow, cf. Slote 192). As he is searching intently for something that is present, he is unprepared to recognize that he is actually confronted with an absence - the “sight most deletious” (247.20). For all the apparent clues and variant forms of “heliotrope” littering the text, there is no single “correct” rendering within II.1. In the absence of such a pristine example, these instances point instead towards themselves as interference, as noise, as error. They are invitations to depart from any initial or imagined goal, and to wander within and beyond the text - a shift signaled in the final round of questioning.

There suddenly it is the Maggies who are interrogating Shem - exercising control over the narrative in a manner unimaginable within Network 1800. They mark this control by turning the tables on Shem, asking “Willest thou rosy banders having?” (FW 250:3). The question echoes a German children’s rhyme about courtship, asking a suitor to declare his intent with a rosy band, or pink ribbon (cf. Slote 206), while also seemingly asking Shem if he is getting an erection from the display. This may be a taunt about his sexual orientation - Shem at least seems to take it that way, making some sort of gestural joke involving his buttocks - but at another level it is a question about his relation to gender. Slote points to an echo inserted in the galleys between this passage and the “sight most deletious,” a resonance that clarifies the question somewhat: Is Shem the type to look for courtship and marriage, adopting expected cisgender roles and responses within a discursive system already breaking down around him? Or, having been afforded a glimpse of gender as absence, is he the type to try on other cultural, gender, and discursive configurations? In his subsequent answers an overcompensating Shem mimes the sexually aggressive acts of swabbing a chimney and cutting up maidenheads, indicating his willingness to shoulder the patriarchal burden and one day issue disciplinary thunderbolts of his own. Had he heeded the negative answers of the Maggies, he might have recognized negation as a strategy in itself: a refusal to play the game by the rules on offer. Instead, he enthusiastically plugs himself into the existing discursive circuit; it is left to Issy to take up the mantle of Samus and find another way to play the Wake.

This develops more clearly in Book II.2, when the Wake children proceed from games to a lesson, and the brothers attempt to engage, albeit irreverently, with the material being presented. Issy however has her own strategy: she sets about de-coding. As Jen Shelton points out, of all the “characters,” Issy is the only one who “knows what she cannot know [...] the sigla Joyce used in his Finnegans Wake notebooks” (203); she lists them in a footnote as “the Doodles family” (Wake 299.fn4), and in so doing refuses to allow the sigla to resolve and be co-opted as alphanumeric certainties. Shem might not be able to decipher or even see “holytroopers,” but Issy can apparently look through that text and into the Notebooks themselves, into the raw material out of which the Wake will emerge.

Credit: thegrammarofmatter.wordpress.com

While the brothers set about drawing their own mother’s pudendum (293) - the abiding location of the Discourse 1800 maternal brain - Issy refuses to be reduced to the next generation’s geometry; as Shelton notes, Issy doesn’t respond to the text so much as predict, or even dictate it: she has gotten into the code of the discourse and begun manipulating it, making it undermine and ridicule itself. Issy is a glitcher, intruding footnotes into the text and jumping into them, finding entire secret worlds to inhabit from which she can interrupt the discursive assembly line. This mode of textual interaction represents a sort of aspirational criticism, fusing the analytical with the imaginative. Such potential is inherent (albeit too rarely explored) within the project of critique - recent projects in game criticism such as Anna Anthropy’s hybrid personal history and scholarly monograph on ZZT or Brendan Keogh’s critical LP of Modern Warfare may signal a shift toward an aesthetic potentially exportable to and productive within many other fields of inquiry.

Instead of playing along with hapless Shem, searching for a single certainty, we should be glitching with Issy, alive to hundreds and millions of playful possibilities, devising ways to evade and expose the basic flaws of a given configuration, and discover alternatives to inhabit. In fact, we might even follow her lead and, keeping Agamben in mind, dare to alter that famous 12th quiz question, like so:

12. Sacer esto?
Answer: Samus sumus!

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. “Dante[...] Bruno. Vico.. Joyce.” Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. New York: New Directions, 1972. 3-22.

Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990.

Knowles, Sebastian D.G. “Finnegans Wake for Dummies.” James Joyce Quarterly 46.1 (Fall 2008), 97-111.

Latham, Sean. “Playing Finnegans Wake: The Half-Real World of I.6.” Pre-publication copy, forthcoming from University of Florida Press.

Nintendo of America. Metroid. 1986.

Norris, Margot. “Joyce’s Heliotrope.” Coping With Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium. Ed. Morris Beja and Shari Benstock. Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University Press, 1989. 3-24.

Schork, R.J. “Genetic Primer: Chapter I.6.” How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide. Ed. Luca Crispi and Sam Slote. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. 124-41.

Seid, Danielle M. “Reveal.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1:1-2 (May 2014), 176-7.

Shelton, Jen. “Issy’s Footnote: Disruptive Narrative and the Discursive Structure of Incest in Finnegans Wake.” English Literary History 66.1 (Spring 1999), 203-21.

Slote, Sam. “Blanks for When Words Gone: Chapter II.1.” How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake. 181-213.

Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. Kittler and the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.