kicked out of my James Joyce college class. It wasn’t because I didn’t know the material or that I was doing poorly on my tests, no, I actually knew Joyce’s work better than the instructor. The reason I got kicked out was because I wouldn’t take my hat off in the classroom. What a fuck head.

When I first signed up for the class I was so excited. I had read everything by Joyce at least once, Ulysses twice even, and I thought it would be fun to discuss his work in a class environment with other like-minded scholars of this great, Irish author. Plus I was well into his last book, one of the most daunting pieces of literature ever written, Finnegans Wake, and it was essential that I study this text with the help of an authority. This was a senior level class after all, so I expected the curriculum to consist of a very in-depth and rigorous study of Joyce’s work. Instead I found myself in a room full of cowboys and cheerleaders led by a wizened old instructor who was more interested in power and control than Joyce’s work.

In America, high school is little more than teenage elementary school and the academic level of most colleges has deteriorated to the level of high school. Though the art, architecture and philosophy departments at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, where I went to school, were intellectually acceptable, the rest of the school was, for the most part, an agricultural school. So the majority of the population on campus was comprised of, well, hicks. Fuckin’ redneck shitheads in every fucking class outside my major. It was a marvel these backwood, inbreds could even write, and it’s no wonder why the teacher in my senior level Joyce class was more concerned with what color ink we wrote in, where our names should appear on our essays (in the upper right hand corner ONLY!), where the date and title of the essay should go and how many spaces were between lines. Among other things. And it came as no surprise, after he wasted the entire first class going over his anal retentive rules, that when he passed out the syllabus it didn’t contain a single mention of Finnegans Wake. Ulysses, even, was just kind of tacked on at the end as an after thought. “If we have time,” it read. The entire semester was dedicated to Joyce’s first two works, Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Joyce’s first two works are two of the greatest works in literature, and two of my favorite books ever, but because they’re so great they’re often assigned in college, entry-level literature classes and even in high school literature classes (which is where I read them). It seemed to me that anyone who was taking any senior level lit class would have read both works by then, let alone someone interested solely in a Joyce class. Not to slight Joyce, but the idea of going back and reading those two works in a senior lit class felt like I was being assigned Cat in the Hat again.

“I don’t mean to sound pompous, or anything,” I said to the teacher after class, “but I’ve pretty much read everything by Joyce. I’m a big fan. I’m even in the middle of the Wake right now.” He wasn’t impressed. I continued. “So I couldn’t help but notice that this class focuses only on his early work?”

“Mm-hm,” he said without looking up.

“So I was just wondering, do you think it’s worth taking this class, for me?”

I shouldn’t even have asked. I should have announced my transfer out of the class right then, but the old coot sweet-talked me into staying. “Who knows?” he said, “you might learn something new?” He even said I’d be a valuable asset to the class. I’d be like the class authority. The girls would go, “My, isn’t he an authority on Joyce? I like to have sex with men who are authorities on Joyce!” My vanity squelched any possibility of leaving after that offer, so I made the mistake of staying. Besides, I reasoned, I already had all the texts, so I didn’t have to spend any money there. So, yeah, the class saved me money, but did I learn anything new? No. The only thing I learned in that class was a million different ways to hate that man.

While Dubliners [removing pipe from mouth] is a marvelous work of literature, Portrait of the Artist is, if you’ve never read it before, perhaps the best place to start with Joyce. It’s a delightful book. But the real genius of James Joyce emerges in his last two books: Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. While the Wake has gone mostly misunderstood since its publication, Ulysses is almost universally acknowledged as the greatest work ever written in modern literature. And what’s funny is, it’s about nothing. And I love it. But when it comes to Finnegans Wake, I revere it like it’s a sacred text. I can absolutely understand how a devout Christian feels about his Bible. The words inside were written by a god.

I’ve discovered over the years that I’m more of a fan of writing than I am of the story. Sure, I enjoy a little Hemingway, a little Steinbeck, but I’ve found the authors that I’m most fond of are men like Beckett, Pynchon and, of course, Joyce. The latter belongs in the pantheon of the greatest writers of all time, with Homer and Dante and Shakespeare and Goethe. (The last of which I don’t really care for, but he’s always listed as one of the greats. So, you know…) And Finnegans Wake is, in my opinion, one of the greatest and most ambitious works of literature ever created.

Another one of my college professors once told me to never read texts surrounding a work, just read the work itself. I think I was about to read The Tao. While I’ve steadfastly agreed with that piece of advice over the years, Finnegans Wake is an exception to the rule. It is, in fact, one of the most difficult and daunting books to understand, and without the aid of at least one accompanying text, you’ll never understand the breadth or appreciate the depth of what Joyce has accomplished. (I’ll list a few in a moment).

At first glance, it’s a real fucking mess. Every page, every sentence, indeed every word has multiple meanings. And its ambiguity was intentional. It is, after all, Joyce’s “night book”. While Ulysses was a book about one day in Leopold Bloom’s life, the Wake is, in one sense, one man’s dream one night. And, like a dream, everything is constantly in flux.

As Joseph Campbell writes, “In a gigantic wheeling rebus, dim effigies rumble past, disappear into foggy horizons, and are replaced by other images, vague but half consciously familiar. On the revolving stage, mythological heroes and events of remotest antiquity occupy the same spatial and temporal planes as modern personages and contemporary happenings. All time occurs simultaneously; Tristram and the Duke of Wellington, Father Adam and Humpty Dumpty merge in a single precept. Multiple meanings are present in every line; interlocking allusions to key words and phrases are woven like fugal themes into the pattern of the work. Finnegans Wake is a prodigious, multifaceted monomyth, not only the cachemer of a Dublin citizen but the dreamlike saga of guilt-stained, evolving humanity.”

That’s actually a passage from the first book Joseph Campbell ever wrote. Yeah, the mythology guy. It’s titled, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake; it’s back in print, and I highly recommend it to anyone who chooses to dive into the Wake. The other book I’ve found helpful to understanding the work is Roland McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake, which is a line by line reference to Joyce’s allusions in the text. While you’ll never get the themes and story from McHugh’s book, it’s very helpful with understanding Joyce’s use of languages and etymology of words you’re not familiar with. For example, on the first page of the Wake you’ll come across the sentence, “Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.” Without McHugh’s book you never would have known that “regginbrow” is a nod to the German word for rainbow, regenbogen. Among other things. And the rainbow motif appears frequently throughout the book. Yes, it gets crazy. And having a couple books to refer to are essential in understanding this book.

But let’s not get bogged down in the details.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is its circular structure. It begins and ends in the middle of the same sentence: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

Just as the previous work, Ulysses, borrowed Homer’s Odyssey as the framework for the book, so too does Finnegans Wake borrow a framework upon which to hang a story. In this case it’s 18th century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico’s La Scienza Nuova and his notion of a cyclical history of mankind that can be divided into four ages, repeating themselves over and over again.

“Essentially,” Joseph Campbell writes, “Vico’s notion is that history passes through four phases: theocratic, aristocratic, democratic and chaotic. The last phase is characterized (like our own) by individualism and sterility, and represents the nadir of man’s fall. It is terminated by a thunderclap, which terrifies and reawakens mankind to the claims of the supernatural, and thus starts the cycle rolling again with a return to primeval theocracy.”

Vico, in turn, borrowed his four part cycle from the Greek mythological sequence of the Four Ages (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Iron) which itself parallels the Hindu Round of the Four Yugas (Krita, Treta, Dvapara, Kali). It’s fascinating how Joyce weaves all of this information into the book and actually creates a circular text. And, as I said, it’s essential that you have some guidance with you along the journey because you’ll never get it on your own. Unless you’re a fucking genius. Which I’m not.

Without going into anymore of the book, I will say that there are great rewards to be had for all the work you put into reading it. Weird things start happening when you read Finnegans Wake. At least to me they do. And I’ve read that it’s not uncommon. Very odd, synchronistic events begin occurring with unusual frequency. Something Thomas Campbell (the painter) would call being “all hooked up.” Like you’re part of some invisible, cosmic, electrical karma grid, or something. Why, just now I was putting the Wake back on the shelf in my library when I realized I had to poo. I started for the bathroom, but the book beckoned me back. I always read something when I crap, usually just a magazine, but in my head it was as if the book were saying, “Read me!” So I walked back to the book case, grabbed Finnegans Wake and continued on to the loo. On the way I opened the book to the page that was marked, and the first word I read was, oddly enough, “poo.” On page 546, Joyce wrote, “Who gave you that numb? Poo!” Trippy, right?

Maybe that’s not worth all the work? I don’t know. I kind of enjoy shit like that. I also enjoyed torturing professors in college that I didn’t like.

As my college Joyce class dragged on, it was clear I didn’t belong in it. It was a waste of time, and I grew to hate the man that taught it more and more each day. It didn’t take me long to realize that I was more of a Joyce scholar than he was. And I began to wield my superior knowledge as a weapon, a tactic that ultimately resulted in my expulsion from the class.

For revenge, I’d attend every class with some question I knew he couldn’t answer. “Was Joyce living in Zurich at the time?” “How many eye operations did he have again?” “Didn’t he like Nora to shit on him in the bathtub?” It was an ongoing joke in the class. He’d fidget for a bit, ramble a little and eventually dismiss my question and move on, but I was causing damage to his authority.

Finally, one day, he exacted revenge of his own.

“Please take off your hat in my classroom,” he said to me as he walked into the class.

Take off my hat? I was wearing the same ski cap I had worn every day to class. My hair was dyed purple and I was in between treatments so it kind of looked like someone had puked on my head. Thus the hat.

“I won’t begin class until you remove your hat,” he said again, more sternly. The whole class turned to look at me.

“Why?” I stammered.

“Because gentlemen do not wear hats indoors,” he said. Like I said, he was a real fuddy duddy and a stickler for rules.

There was a girl two seats in front of me also wearing a hat. “Well, she’s wearing a hat. Why doesn’t she have to take her hat off?”

“Because she’s a lady.”

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?” I asked. “A hat’s a hat.”

“Do you wish to hold up the entire class?” he asked crossing his arms. “Because I won’t begin until you remove your hat.” Everyone was staring at me. It was turning into a real showdown.

“Dude, what’s your problem? It’s just a hat,” I whined. “I’m not taking my hat off.”

“Well, then you can leave,” he said. “Because I will not begin this class until you remove it.”

I suddenly realized that I had probably made a lot of enemies in the class because there were some people who were downright mad dogging me.

What do I do? What do I do? There was nothing I could do. In chess it’s called a fork. I lose either way. I either remove my hat like a little bitch, or leave like a little bitch. He had made a brilliant move.

I threw my book in my bag, pulled my hat down even further and walked out.

“Fuck you,” I said as I left.

I never went back. And that’s how I got