Book Review: A Pittance of Passions — Andre Solnikkar

Is it possible that from the conception of literature writers have been mostly mistaken in utilising their knowledge through the medium of storytelling? Whichever primary form of ideation they claim to have learned from the world is largely represented by convention and not wherever their disciplines truly derive.

What need was there for a narrative to spawn? How do the costumed truths of Homer fare posthumously in the Iliad or Laurence Sterne his Smelfungus? Such vital reassessments are necessarily inquired when recounting the episodic allegories of A Pittance of Passions.

Perhaps this gnawing sense for completion stems from something fundamental in our thinking which refuses to let go of what greater meaning language means to offer. Often we are apt to think too critically when it comes to justifying each chapter of a book, every utterance of a tale strung along towards conceding a conclusion out loud.

“And as a velvet kiss took his breath, he wanted to melt and release and transcend, and his heart ached for a sigh. ‘Who are you really?’ he wondered.

And the harbinger smiled in the night. ‘The madness which is the core and meaning of all. I reach beyond your reason and beneath your soul. I sow and reap, and you stare at me with confusion flickering in blinded eyes, silently asking: Why?’”

A Pittance of Passions is a deeply psychological emanation, a catering of mania, wherein its Tirnancaitian sensibilities, whether among the king or the fool, end up familiarly and cumulatively marred by the glaring conceits of its characters’ impassioned refusal to play fair with the nightmare they find themselves maddeningly lost in, reborn to, or in charge of.

Several recognisable literary figures appear throughout its composition of epigrammatic beauty: Thomas Bernhard, Georg Büchner, Hamlet & Macbeth, Lao Tzu & Zhuangzi, Mervyn Peake, Flann O’Brien. Jewels of dramatic introspection professed by each archetypal player during a cynic’s Goon Show—mere concepts to be entertained by minds plagued with metaphor and meaning and outright twaddle.

A sniping mandrake oftentimes seems the tale’s sole enlightened fabulist. Deriving from the earth itself, fey in her rudeness above ground, human only by figure yet lacking a soul as men would see it except where she might compel fools alike to converse with her far from the forest’s edge and darkly seduce them astray, playfully yawning all the while...

“Revel in your blindness. Be formless as water. Flow and reflect. Rise to the sky or seep into the soil. Know no more of obstacles than of a goal. Be glad that you are not while pretending that you are.”

Each conversation is doubly significant to keep in the back of one’s mind when progressing further and further into this converging dream, whether through brief ruminations of an elderly exacerbated king or the legend of a fledgling raven-tongued woodwose finally making his way out of the weald.

Lastly, the bare requisite of narrative, or lack thereof, is what blends this tale of obscure parchment into refinement, leaving behind what can only be traced between jagged reflections from a mirrored Naught.

“Wisdom is not meant to endure but to beget mares’ nests and mirror-madness. The dunces think the morons dumb, fools scorn the imbeciles, till fatuous fate forfeits applause by playing to a charnel house!”

Book Review: Finnegans Wake — James Joyce

“Imagination by itself, unlike every clear and distinct idea, does not of its own nature carry certainty with it. In order that we may attain certainty of what we imagine, there has to be something in addition to imagination, namely, reasoning.”

— Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

I

I consider style to always be an affectation of expression. Every encampment of ideation is integrally fortified by style. Yet it is not style but temperament which predates the basis from which all artists diverge in influence. Two minds can find the same meaning in something yet choose to define it by varying degrees of complexity and it is these primary ideas about the world reflected into significance that I expect of the artist to uniquely represent.

No one can sincerely escape their own temperament nor resist developing their tastes and abilities by one. However, I believe that reality is orthodox, and every mind inside it, which is how artists are able to communicate mutual themes and subjects, experiences from their corner of the world to another, but language is the bind necessary to fully facilitate that expression, to formally imbue the image with its own veritable meaning, and if that bind is intentionally frayed or losing, then the integrity of what it stands to connect renders itself basically untethered, lost, a writhing enigma.

To briefly outline, my main disapproval of Finnegans Wake has always resided in the focus of its deliberately anomalous composition. I would like to suggest its attestability as being subjectively written for no particular crowd and therefore unaffiliated with its reigning title among literary as well as lingual and canonically ranging works, for I am thoroughly unconvinced that it should be liable to any wider critique than as a misled exception by the great author. My only rule in reviewing Finnegans Wake is that it must be considered as an anomalous work of intentional obscurity by the wayside of literature.

II

When someone reading Finnegans Wake for the first time notices the few marred Latin droplets and erroneous capitalisation, they are thrust hence into the investigative position to find its closest real meaning from the dictionary of the sane.

In such a book, Joyce could have discredited a thousand mistakes in his schema that only he could later devise as being permissible to conceal, kneading this novelty genre where only the author is authorial to what is good and true. In short, Joyce conducted Finnegans Wake where he is vain leader.

Handpicked parcels of phrase, disjoined misspellings, stale etymological non-native fancies. Intended to encourage facing a blank slate of gibberish, the dull joke that waits on every page. Marring the typeface with intentional marks and irritations, experimental replacements in a benign scheme, a collage of code: an enigma unto the study of authorial intent as opposed to what is ably discerned from the work itself.

There are possible meanings reflected from all angles in every possible word mangled to befuddle recognition between dozens of languages distilled even further to an English script wherein each page, each encasement of miserly Wake lore pieced through hardly illuminates anything but by its tone and atmosphere, impossible to make out the sunset from the crossing pines, navigable only by lame wits to weasel out puns and oblige slack riddles and makeshift linguistics.

The use of merging other languages and punctuation wholesale or piecemeal is not an improvement upon expression in English, especially into languages which require reading under specific indices typically argued for under secondary literature or else the allusive pretence of multilingualism.

Committed to rendering inconsequential harpings with the bones and ivy of words, trawling myriad banks of lexica and vernacular while infusing baseless humour into the phonetic credibility of innuendo, miscellaneous feeling, and whatever other geometrical secrets sunken into each printed page’s foreground encourage.

III

If a painter intends to paint a scene they saw exactly in their dream, what they would invariably end up rendering would be owed only to their own coincidental selection of paints. The perspective of the canvas, incapable of mirroring the definitive judgement that they intended it to portray, would become warped by reality.

Treating words less like tools and more with indistinguishable brushstrokes, finally pretending their finished picture retains an excusable meaning or else are turned prideful that it may contain a million subjective little ones framing the totality of its vouched worth.

IV

For all the patience I have attempted with the work over the years, to try to read Finnegans Wake with collected insight beforehand or upon revisiting usually wears thinnest on impact for how much else there is to constantly identify. The layers billow without form, a kaleidoscopic concentration. You are only ever going to query speechlessly what you find asleep and dreaming here.

Like atonal music that cannot rightly be listenable, there is no taste that redeems its wordage without surrendering to the mysterious potential in its conception of what complexity must be ever latent.

Thematic regulations prove about as illuminating as the language instated throughout, rendering linearity impossible but a mournful mound of disguised definitions and semantic filament.

Were it an experiment sincere or a humourless wad in testing the farthest limits of literary form, it has only succeeded in the presumption of no more necessary convolution than its standard, forfeiting reason into obscurity.

Finnegans Wake is either so far a mistaken venture as to be closer to a tedious sanguine pun or else intentionally unnavigable—in either case, both would have to be deemed anomalous.

Ultimately, it is a book read in order to recycle how you think it ought to be further read because it cannot be truly understood.

V

• Is Finnegans Wake an artform made out of words rather than just a novel?
• Is Ulysses the only reputation it needs?
• Is wisdom required to trust the seventeen years Joyce spent writing it?
• Is claiming needless obscurity to feign one’s own understanding?
• Is the ambition alone worthy of paying attention to it?

I implore anyone with a consistent opinion on Finnegans Wake to explore and investigate such considerations regarding the paltry victory of its prevalence, your proud enigma.