With apologies to PP for hijacking his thread:
// But Finnegans Wake IS incomprehensible, or do you claim otherwise? //
I don’t claim to have read all of it, and I imagine very few have. Much of it looks like gibberish at first sight, but the text is full of allusions, jokes, puns and leitmotivs. There are as many ways of reading it as there are readers, but I see it on one level as a series of word games. In the same way that I feel a sense of satisfaction if I can solve one or two clues in a fiendish crossword, I derive enjoyment from identifying an obscure reference or pun in the text. Take the book’s first sentence as an example:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
The first word, riverrun, refers to the River Liffey, which runs through Dublin, as well as ‘running’ (i.e. being a recurrent theme) through the book itself. It doesn’t begin with a capital, because the first sentence in the novel is a continuation of the last: Finnegan beginagain. (And yet, the book does begin with a capital, that capital being Dublin itself.)
“Eve and Adam’s” refers to the Church of St Francis of Assisi, also known as Adam and Eve’s church, which is on the banks of the Liffey. Adam and Eve also represent the beginning of humanity.
There’s nothing incomprehensible about ‘swerve of shore and bend of bay’, which together with ‘riverrun’ give the novel’s first sentence a mellifluous beauty.
‘Commodius’ alludes to ‘comfortable’ and also ‘commode’; with a hint of scatology, Joyce is referring to the Liffey’s function of flushing the city’s detritus into the Irish Sea. ‘Vicus’ means ‘settlement’ or ‘thoroughfare’ in Latin, and here refers both to the city and the river. It is also a pun on ‘vicious’, so that the ‘commodius vicus of recirculation’ becomes a vicious circle, as the water flows into the sea, where it evaporates and returns to the earth as rain to complete the cycle, just as the novel’s first sentence completes its last.
‘Howth Castle and Environs’ refers to the castle on the promontory on the northern side of Dublin Bay, into which the Liffey flows. The initial letters HCE also refer to many expressions in the book, including Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, the main protagonist.
And that’s just the first sentence. There are doubtless dozens of references I have overlooked, but you get the general idea. Gibberish? Quite possibly. It could all be a great Joycean joke at the readers’ expense. Even if it is nothing but a load of dingoes’ kidneys, it still provides endless employment for the Majikthises and Vroomfondels in English departments around the world – well, at least the ones that haven’t cancelled Joyce yet...