By Sara Noah
In October 2023, a group of fifteen people gathered on a Zoom call, took a collective breath, and read the final page of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Then they turned back to the beginning and started again. It was the second Tuesday of the month – the same slot the Marshall McLuhan Finnegans Wake Reading Club had occupied since 1995. The difference was that this time, Gerry Fialka, the experimental filmmaker who founded the group nearly three decades earlier, had to admit that they had, in a technical sense, finished a book. “I don’t want to lie, it wasn’t like I saw God,” Fialka told The Guardian. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
That understatement belies an extraordinary feat of literary endurance. For twenty-eight years, a rotating cast of between ten and thirty readers met monthly at the Venice branch of the Los Angeles Public Library – later on Zoom – to read one page of what is widely regarded as the most difficult novel in the Western canon. Each page consumed a two-hour discussion. The 628-page text took longer to read than Joyce spent writing it: seventeen years, including a four-year stretch of near-total writer’s block, as Sam Slote, a Joyce scholar at Trinity College Dublin and editor of How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake, has noted.
Why Finnegans Wake Defies Every Expectation
Published in 1939, Finnegans Wake is Joyce’s final and most radical work. It is written in what the University of Florida Press aptly describes as “a complex, pun-based idiogloss” – a language Joyce constructed from portmanteau words, multilingual puns, and allusions drawn from roughly eighty languages. The narrative, if it can be called that, follows the fall and resurrection of a fictional Irish hod-carrier named Tim Finnegan, channelling the structure of Giambattista Vico’s cyclical theory of history. Characters blur into one another. Setting is fluid. The first sentence begins mid-word, and the final sentence ends mid-word, completing a loop that sends the reader back to page one.
While Joyce’s Ulysses has a reputation as a challenging novel, Slote has described Finnegans Wake as “a whole different level”. Ongoing scholarly debate persists over fundamental questions: where and when the novel is set, who its characters actually are, and what any individual sentence might mean. Critics have called it gibberish, a waste of paper, and evidence of Joyce’s declining sanity. Supporters, conversely, have devoted entire careers to its study. Joseph Campbell described it as containing “all the myths, programmes, slogans, hopes, prayers, tools, educational theories, and theological bric-a-brac of the past millennium.” Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist after whom Fialka’s reading group is named, called it “the greatest guide to the media ever devised on this planet”.
John McCourt, an English professor at the University of Macerata and president of the International James Joyce Foundation, has described Finnegans Wake as “the perfect antidote to our times, where we live under the illusion that everything can be reduced to a tweet.” The novel’s refusal to yield easy meaning, McCourt has argued, “reinstates the necessary complexity of human existence.”
The Man Behind the Marathon
Gerry Fialka is an unlikely literary pilgrim. A self-described “antiquarian ne’er-do-well” from Venice, California, he worked for Frank Zappa and later George Carlin before becoming an experimental filmmaker. He once told The Guardian that his phone interview style – “zigs, zags and sheer velocity” – was unmatched in the interviewer’s nearly twenty-year journalism career. “You know, listening to me talking is sensory overload,” Fialka acknowledged.
Fialka started the reading group in October 1995, partly because he never would have tackled the book alone. “I’ve gotten to encounter a lot of people who become my friends,” he told NPR’s Anna Scott. He describes the group as “more a performance art piece than a book club” – also a “living organism”, a “hootenanny”, and a “choir”. Members would arrive at the Venice library, read the page aloud, and then spend two hours dissecting it, often with Fialka guiding discussion through McLuhan’s media theory. The first half-hour of each meeting typically addressed current events through McLuhan’s “Tetrad of Media Effects” before turning to Joyce.
The club’s early atmosphere, according to Bruce Woodside – a seventy-four-year-old retired Disney animator who joined in the 1990s – was “kind of chaotic”. Woodside, who had been reading Finnegans Wake since his late teens, recalled that the first impression of most readers was “gibberish”, and that “a lot of commentary on it was gibberish, too.” He dropped out for roughly two decades. When he returned after retirement, having sampled other groups – including a Proust reading group that had pivoted to Joyce – he found that Fialka’s club was “just fun”. In the twenty years Woodside had been absent, the group had advanced from page one to page fifteen.
The Pandemic, Zoom, and a Global Network
The COVID-19 pandemic threatened to end the streak. When libraries closed their doors, Fialka moved meetings to Zoom, and the community – scattered now across California, Chicago, and beyond – persisted. Steven Kedrowski, who joined around 2005 and later relocated to Chicago, told NPR that “reading one page a month over twenty-some years, I couldn’t tell you very much about the plot. What you’re really getting is just really diving into the details of that specific moment.”
The pandemic shift also connected the Venice group to a wider constellation of Finnegans Wake readers. Fialka has said he once saw a list of at least fifty-two active reading groups worldwide. Slote, the Joyce scholar, believes there are more. A Zurich group, founded in 1984 by Fritz Senn at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, has read the book three times in nearly forty years and is well into its fourth cycle – its first reading taking eleven years. In Dublin, a weekly group of about a dozen Joyce scholars at Trinity College is on track to finish in fifteen years. Peter Quadrino, a thirty-eight-year-old corporate employee who joined Fialka’s group around 2008, drove three hours each way from San Diego to attend meetings. When he moved to Austin, Texas, in 2011, he started his own group – posting fliers and newspaper ads. Twelve years in, Quadrino’s Austin club is halfway through the text, on track for completion in approximately twenty-four years.
Different groups develop distinct personalities. “The New York group is really argumentative, and they’re always yelling at each other, but they’re all friends, they’ve all known each other for twenty years,” Quadrino told The Guardian. His Austin group, by contrast, is “more friendly, more ‘Yes, and'”. The Zurich group, which attracts retirees and university students in roughly equal measure, is “benevolent, although it can also become competitive and contentious”, according to member Sabrina Alonso.
Why the Slowest Reading Is the Point
Joyce himself anticipated readers who would devote their lives to this text. He once described the ideal Finnegans Wake reader as “suffering from an ideal insomnia” and said: “The demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his entire life to reading my works.” There is something fitting, then, about a group that treats a 628-page book as a lifelong project – one that has arguably fuelled a broader resurgence of interest in slow, communal reading experiences.
The difficulty of the text is, paradoxically, what makes it democratic. Slote has observed that expertise in Finnegans Wake doesn’t go very far. “You have to accept that no one person is really going to get it,” he said, “which is where the idea of community reading can really kick in.” The decoding of Joyce’s allusions – spanning nineteenth-century Irish politics, French literature, drinking songs, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead – demands collective effort. As Quadrino put it: “In the course of a meeting, I have thirty different Wikipedia tabs open. You’re always learning about some new historical figure, or event, or some poet. It really just feels like my brain just took a shower.”
Fialka has said the experience was not about epiphany but about process. “In the midst of something that seems complex if it flips in the a-ha moment, you’re like, wow,” he told NPR. “You’ll have a revelation or what Joyce called – so appropriately – epiphanies in everydayness.”
The Book That Never Ends
Fialka is emphatic that reports of the group “finishing” Finnegans Wake are misleading. “We didn’t end,” he told The Guardian. “The last sentence of the book ends midsentence and then it picks up at the front of the book. It’s cyclical. It never ends.” In November 2023, the club restarted from page three. “There is no next book,” Fialka said. “We’re only reading one book. Forever.”
This insistence on the cyclical – on reading as a perpetual return rather than a linear progression – speaks to something deeper than literary trivia. In an age of algorithmic content consumption and five-second attention spans, the Marshall McLuhan Finnegans Wake Reading Club offers a counter-narrative: that some works of art are not meant to be “solved” but inhabited. Joyce built a labyrinth; Fialka and his readers have chosen to live inside it. It is precisely the kind of stubborn, unhurried devotion that Marian Keyes once argued belongs only to readers who refuse to be bored – or, perhaps, who have redefined what engagement means.
For those interested in joining or starting their own group, the directory maintained by Finnegans Wake scholars lists active communities across the United States, Ireland, Switzerland, Australia, Sweden, and Ukraine. As Quadrino said: “If you’re really interested in Finnegans Wake, it’s kind of hard to find people who will talk about it with you.” The Venice club proved that the search is worth it – and that the conversation, much like the book itself, is designed never to conclude.
