Joyceans bent on resolving playful 'Wake'

It was 9 p.m. on a Tuesday night and Boston College's Pratrician Pratyusers were proud of their night's work. It had taken two hours, and they had managed to get through one entire paragraph.

But then, progress and achievement are measured differently when you're reading James Joyce's epic novel "Finnegans Wake," one of the most complex literary works ever written. The book is 680 pages long, so, at the rate that the group of 14 or so graduate students and professors are going, it will take more than 39 years to finish.

"Long after I'm dead," laughed professor Joseph Nugent, a native Irishman who started the weekly group two years ago after coming to BC from the University of California at Berkeley.

Nugent and the group of four women and eight men spent two hours discussing a chunk of text in a graduate student center lounge over minimuffins and $9 bottles of merlot before adjourning to the Green Briar Pub in Brighton.

The group is purely voluntary (no course credit) and, like "Finnegans Wake" groups in Somerville and elsewhere, pursues its goal without much real hope of finishing. Members refer to it simply as the Wake Group; Nugent only jokingly suggested Pratrician Pratyusers as another name because it shows how dense and multifaceted, yet humorous, the work they are tackling is.

The phrase appears at the beginning of the first chapter of the fourth section of the book, when the protagonist, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, may be hearing a radio advertisement for Guinness beer. "We have highest gratifications in announcing to pewtewr publikumst of pratician pratyusers, gen-ghis is ghoon for you," Joyce wrote.

In using the term pratician, the group decides, Joyce is making a reference to Ireland's religious patron, St. Patrick. Yet by switching the order of the second, third, and fourth letter, Joyce has also injected into the text the Irish term prate, a word that means aimless chatter and is related to prattle." Joyce then repeats the sound in pratyusers, reinforcing both the idea of idle chatter and a reference to the people of Ireland, where praty is a term for a potato.

Nugent and the group decide that Joyce is referring to the Irish as a bunch of nattering potato eaters. The dissection of the two words took almost 10 minutes.

Dense as a collapsing star, "Finnegans Wake" is an exercise in both drudgery and futility for the solitary reader. In the 17 years he took to write it, Joyce packed in so many allusions, puns, non-English words (in low German, Sanskrit, Gaelic, among others), metaphors, and references to both the history and the culture of his time that many say the only person who could fully understand the book would have been the author himself.

It's only in a group setting -- preferably a smart, diverse group -- that the true enjoyment of the work comes out, said Nugent, who has been asked to give a seminar on putting together "Finnegans Wake" reading groups in June at the annual James Joyce conference in Austin, Texas.

"For me to read a page on my own, no matter how long I would spend on it, would be tiresome," Nugent said. "But when you've got a group of people, all bringing their own bits of information and their own points of view, some more off the wall than others, it comes together to produce a really wonderful whole."

The BC Wake Group is relatively well equipped to tackle the book. One member is a medievalist; others are specialists in Irish literature, history, and linguistics. Nugent said he is trying to persuade a physicist to join.

Members of the group beam when Nugent praises a particularly insightful or original interpretation.

There is a bit of a letdown when they are forced to consult a reference work, such as "Annotations to Finnegans Wake," by Roland McHugh.

Doug Scheuring, a second-year master's student in English literature, decodes many of the Catholic and religious allusions and references for the group.

Scheuring, who lives in Brookline, became fascinated by "Finnegans Wake" when, as an undergraduate, he awoke from a nap while his theater-major roommate was reading aloud as a vocal exercise.

"I remember that I was in that state where nothing makes sense because you're just waking up," he said. "Then I got beyond that state, and it still didn't make sense, because he was reading from 'Finnegans Wake.' "

Surprisingly, only a few people in the group are of Irish heritage. Nugent's suggestion after the reading session that they hold a St. Patrick's Day celebration at his house drew a tepid response.

Nugent said no one in the group is particularly concerned about finishing the book, if for no other reason than its circular structure leads to an ending that's back at the beginning.

If you are going on a journey that will only put you back where you started, he said, the point is to enjoy the ride.