Dear friends,
On May 4th, Finnegans Wake turned 80. For the past six weeks, we’ve been in Ireland celebrating the book’s birthday, with Trinity College’s FW @ 80 conference and now at the James Joyce Centre’s Finnegans Wake-End. These events mark a significant shift in the Wake‘s reception in Dublin, and abroad. It might even be the book’s golden era.
Projects like Waywords and Meansigns link the book’s widening audience and the digital era, and this occasion of 80th birthdays seems a suitable time to reflect on Waywords and Meansigns and its future.
Wake-words in the 21st century
There are as many ways to read the book as there are people who read it, and the web offers the Wake a venue for such pluralism-in-action. The 72-hours of audio contained within Waywords and Meansigns – created by hundreds of people from around the world – represents a hub of diverse readings, imaginings, departures, and explorations.
Waywords and Meansigns has been recorded on smartphones and in state-of-the-art studios, broadcast on community and commercial radio, presented in universities and underground blogs. The contributors to Waywords and Meansigns range from the curious passer-by having a laugh one afternoon to someone creating an aural culmination of their life’s engagement with the Wake.
Through such intersections Waywords and Meansigns has questioned the boundaries between expert and amateur, popular and underground, high and low arts, artistic and academic – and like the Wake, the results suggest realities more porous than solid.
The future of Waywords and Meansigns?
As Waywords and Meansigns has been embraced by various communities and institutions, I have used my role as project steward to build bridges between what can seem like disparate niches and worlds. But while creating events and happenings, researching Joyce music, and writing for various audiences, Waywords and Meansigns risks becoming its own kind of institution, with its own focus and fringe.
The heart of this project is the culmination of hundreds of individual and collective takes on the Wake, and it seems important that any discussion of future or change unfolds in line with the visions of Here Comes Everybody.
What do you envision for the future of Waywords and Meansigns? Is the project complete? Or just beginning? Does this thing evolve in some way or simply disappear? Perhaps give the audio to a library, then start a church.
Anyone who wishes a say, or simply wants to hear the conversations, write to Derek at waywordsandmeansigns@gmail.com
The only rules: if you suggest something massive, be prepared to help execute it – and don’t be an asshole. Together we will envision, or at least collectively debate, whatever comes next.
In wake-ness,
Derek