Awake

Driving around the countryside of Co Donegal, occasionally I will pass a temporary sign that says, Wake in Progress.  The quiet, winding lanes will be full of parked cars and vans, as the local community come to pay their respects at the former home of the departed.  The tradition of holding a wake – the time between death and burial, when friends and relatives sit and wait beside the corpse of the deceased, a period of reflection, a remembrance but also a celebration – has declined across much of Western Europe but remains commonplace in Ireland.  I imagine that today most wakes are decorous, but that has not always been the case.  There is a famous Irish song from the mid-nineteenth century about Tim Finnegan, who fell off a ladder when drunk, breaking his skull.  During the wake held at his house, an argument broke out, which turned into a fight, during which a bottle of whiskey was thrown, broke and spilled over his prostrate body, at which point he sprang back to life, saying: Thunderin’ blazes! You think I’m dead?   Excess whiskey was the cause of Tim’s apparent death and so too his return to life.

This paradox was, no doubt, why the song lyric appealed to James Joyce, who borrowed the revenant’s name for his final masterpiece: Finnegans Wake.  In this book, for some time known as Work in Progress, which takes the form of an extended series of philosophical reflections blended with multiple digressions, wordplay and jokes, there is repeated suggestion that what begins must end and what ends must begin again, that what rises will fall and that what falls will rise again, and that all of life is repetition and recycling.  Joyce spoke several languages and enjoyed inventing words that were combinations of elements from different tongues.  The name Finnegan can be decomposed into fin, the French for end, and egan a homonym for again in English: Finnegans means, therefore, to end again and again.  The word Wake might suggest the noun that means the ceremony of remembrance for the dead, or it might suggest the command that means wake up!  His title, therefore, combines ideas of both death and life.  These themes of circularity and continuity are emphasised throughout the text of the book, which starts and ends mid-sentence – the same sentence, Joyce claimed – and which is promiscuous with grammar as well as language, spelling, and narrative structure.  

These reflections re-surfaced in my mind last weekend, as I walked around an exhibition of work by Anselm Kiefer, at The White Cube in London.  For many years Kiefer – now in his late seventies – has produced huge canvases – laden with paint, metal, ash, straw, and other materials – and complex sculptural installations that reference German (and wider European) history and trauma: Wagnerian myths, fields and forests, war and destruction, monuments and ruins, and books and words.  His work focuses on the ill-defined ground that lies between order and chaos, between creation and dissolution.  He has previously acknowledged significant literary influences on his work, notably the German language poets Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, but his current exhibition at The White Cube is all about the work of James Joyce, and especially Finnegans Wake.

The gallery’s broad, bright modernist corridor that leads from the entrance to the four main exhibition spaces has been transformed by Kiefer into a dark, narrow passageway.  Visitors pass between rows of storage racks and shelving units, full of a bewildering variety of objects that have been carefully collected, stored, and preserved, but which seem to have been salvaged from landfill sites.  These objects – broken bicycles, dried sunflowers dipped in paint or metal, pieces of glass and ceramic, suits made from lead on metal hangers, safes and storage boxes, milk churns, straw, bricks, strips of lead, feathers, and much more – are presented as the well-ordered inventory in a Museum of Rubbish.  This is the detritus of industrial society, organised according to some unfathomable cataloguing system.  Each shelf is labelled, with words and phrases from Joyce’s writing, equally mysterious: apparently meaningless strings of words describing apparently broken and dysfunctional objects.  Welcome to the modern world.

In the rooms that open out from the central corridor, there are upturned shopping trolleys dumped in a pile of sand, a heap of building rubble protected by barbed wire, and vast metal shelving systems housing further arrays of curiosities.  There are large paintings, in dark heavy colours, one with old shoes stuck to the canvas, another with several artists’ palettes protruding into space.  There are phrases from Joyce’s book graffitied onto the walls, but the words are never purely descriptive of the works, nor do the works simply illustrate the texts.  The two art forms share the space, each speaking in its own way, neither dominating nor drowning out the other. 

In one room – my favourite in the exhibition – the floor space was littered with twenty-nine huge, electrolysed lead books, among which a terracotta snake was visible alongside a wooden sickle with a steel blade.  The walls were lined with a dozen paintings inspired by the River Liffey – Dublin’s river – which runs as a continuous thread through Joyce’s work: the skies were shimmering gold (not, in my experience, a common occurrence in Leinster), the trees were a mass of rich, warm green leaves, while the water, meandering across the lower third of each canvass, was painted in Verdigris, looking like oxidized copper.  This room presents the viewer with a visual fantasy: sunny rural Ireland as the Garden of Eden, with sin and death hiding in the libraries.  All the same, I found the combination of colours and materials both beautiful and moving.

One striking feature of this exhibition is the vast scale of the work made by Kiefer, which matches the vast scale of Joyce’s writing.  Both men, in the early stages of their careers, produced well-crafted work on a modest scale, for example, Kiefer’s watercolours from the early 1970s or Joyce’s short stories that form his first published work, The Dubliners.  In both cases, the early work deals with the same themes that will dominate the later work, but the forms in which the early work is presented are more compact.  As the writer and the artist become well-known, and publishers and gallerists supplied them with more resources and bigger spaces in which to operate, so the scale and ambition of the work expanded.  The central themes and motifs remain the same but are now explored through large and endless experiment and repetition.  For both men, the principal aesthetic choice has been to use experimental methods and forms to draw attention to the ways that history recurs, and how a better future might be possible but only by repurposing recycled elements from a failed past.  The scale of the work is suggestive of the urgency of the message: say it bigger, say it longer, say it louder: in the beginning were the ruins of our past, these are the only resources we have at our disposal. 

It has been widely observed the Joyce dispensed with the use of an apostrophe in the title of his final book.  If he had only been writing about the memory of Finnegan, the book would have been called Finnegan’s Wake.  By removing the English language script sign for the genitive (the possessive case), Joyce suggests that his book is not simply about the death of one man.  Rather, he takes Finnegan to be an exemplum, a representative of all men and women.  The message of the book is that we are all Finnegans, and the title is therefore not the description of an event but a command to the reader, roughly translated in today’s vernacular as: Wake Up People!

This is also Kiefer’s great theme: that we live too contentedly with the past, insufficiently conscious of the realities of the history that has made us, recycling old myths and deceptions in the present, without being aware that we are doing so.  In a speech in 2008, he said: Rubble is like the blossom of a plant, it is the radiant high point of an incessant metabolism, the beginning of a rebirth.  Our world is cluttered by the debris of former days, shelved, and catalogued ready for re-use, but we need to be alert to the risk of contamination, of constructing a new world from the materials of the old world without a clear understanding as to how and why previously they have failed us.  The cycles of repetition that lie at the heart of Joyce’s writing and Kiefer’s painting do not suggest the impossibility of progress but neither do they suggest that it is guaranteed. 

Both men tell us that we need to make better choices, and we need to make them again and again and again.  It is only by the improved recycling of rubble that we can achieve the ambition of Stephen Daedalus – the central character in Joyce’s earlier work and an avatar for the author – who tells us in Chapter I of Ulysses that, History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.