Once a month for the past 28 years, filmmaker Gerry Fialka has convened a book group to read James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake,” a book that is famously difficult to understand.
This Tuesday, Oct. 3, Fialka’s Venice-Wake group, which he launched at the Venice branch of the Los Angeles Public Library in 1995 and has continued on Zoom since the pandemic, will reach the book’s final page. Has this experience been something he could have ever foreseen?
“I don’t know if I tried to foresee anything,” he says during a phone interview. “I guess I don’t think, ‘This is going to last long.’ I just do it.”
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But the group’s deliberate pace meant they weren’t going to zip through it. “We do one page and then discuss it for two hours,” he says, and laughs. “That’s why it’s taken us 28 years.”
Fialka, who came to California to work for musician Frank Zappa and has since run a number of cultural events, including the 33-year-old PXL THIS Film Festival, says he knows how people typically respond when he tells them his reading group is reading “Finnegans Wake.”
“They go, ‘OK, what book are you gonna read next?’ It’s like, ‘Well, we’re never going to read another book. It’s just one book, you know?’” he says of the project. “The [book’s] last sentence ends mid-sentence, and then it picks back up at the beginning of the book. So it’s like a run-on sentence that ends on page 628, and then page 3, the first page of text, it continues.
“So it’s a cyclical book,” he says. “It never ends,”
Fialka, who involves Marshall McLuhan’s examination of the media as part of the investigation of Joyce’s book (the group is also known as the Marshall McLuhan-“Finnegans Wake” Reading Club), began the project out of curiosity.
“I thought, ‘Well, the only way I’m gonna learn ‘Finnegans Wake’ is by diving in. I’m not a scholar. I’m not an academic. I haven’t even read any other Joyce. And I just said, ‘Why not?’ So it’s been 28 years and it really blossomed into a lot of things.”
Peter Coogan, who describes the group as a “literary adventure,” has been a part of it since 2002 and praises Fialka’s dedication to exploring the book.
“Many scholars say that Joyce’s intention wasn’t to give readers a straightforward experience, or to tell them a straightforward story, but to give them an experience of feeling kind of at a loss, like characters do when they’re in a dream. And so that often means it’s incomprehensible because we experience life and dreams as incomprehensible,” said Coogan, a researcher for nonfiction film.
Fialka, as well as engaging with the book and McLuhan’s theories, touches on numerous other topics through more than an hour of a phone conversation, including namechecking an array of figures – from Jay-Z and William Blake to Philip K. Dick and the Jerky Boys – as he discusses the book.
“It’s a mosaic,” he says of “Finnegans Wake.” “You study the patterns and you figure out which pieces to put together to communicate to other people because you feel that this thing should be communicated to other people.”
Despite its origins as a live meeting, Fialka says he has come to appreciate the Zoom version; he thinks people are able to pay closer attention. But there’s also another reason he prefers the virtual meetings these days.
“I could switch it back to live, but I’m not going to because we’re all too old and we don’t have to park and I don’t have to set up chairs. Basically, I’ve set up chairs for 40 years for all my events,” he said. “I’ve had enough of that.”
Chairs aside, this Tuesday involves reading the final page of the book, so does that mean they’re finished?
“No, we’re never done. The same thing will happen next month,” he says. “We’ll read page three again next … There’s nothing different really.”
Related: Inside the meeting when the group read the final page of “Finnegans Wake.”
For more information, go to laughtears.com/McLuhanWake.html
