Finnegans Wake: Joyce’s other work of quirky genius

The apparent impenetrability of Finnegans Wake ensures it is ignored by most readers. Alan O’Riordan meets a number of people hoping to address this neglect.

ON St Peter’s Road in Phibsborough, on Dublin’s north side, a plaque marks one of the houses as a former residence of James Joyce. There are several of these in Dublin — the peripatetic Joyce family were forever dodging rents and relocating as they moved in a downward spiral from the genteel surroundings of Bray’s seafront to the inner city.

Unusually, Joyce’s father, John Stanislaus, actually owned the house in Phibsborough, until he remortgaged it and could no longer keep up the payments. But in this house, which descended into misery and chaos after his mother died in 1903, Joyce, in the words of his biographer Richard Ellmann, “prepared to become great”.