Sea and River: Reading The Waves with Chapter 1 of Finnegans Wake

 Sea and River: Reading The Waves with Chapter 1 of Finnegans Wake

This year I began reading Finnegans Wake by James Joyce after hearing Benjamin McEvoy recommend an unusual approach: reading one chapter per month. The suggestion immediately appealed to me. Finnegans Wake is not a book that rewards speed. It seems designed to resist it. Rather than a narrative to move through efficiently, it feels more like a linguistic landscape—something that invites wandering, re-reading, and long pauses. Approaching the book at the pace of one chapter per month makes the experience feel less like a challenge to overcome and more like a year-long conversation with Joyce’s language.

Alongside each chapter, I have also begun noticing what other books happen to be present in my reading life and allowing them to function as companion texts. These pairings are not planned in advance. They emerge from the serendipity of whatever I am already reading. For the first chapter of Finnegans Wake, the companion text turned out to be The Waves by Virginia Woolf. I had begun Woolf’s novel in 2025 and wanted to finish it in 2026, so it was already waiting beside me as I started Joyce.

Reading the openings of these two works together revealed an unexpected resonance: both begin with water. Joyce famously opens Finnegans Wake with a river already in motion—“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s…”—a sentence that seems to carry the reader directly into a flowing current of language. The river is not merely a setting but a structural principle. It gathers mythological references, Dublin geography, biblical echoes, nursery rhymes, and fragments of multiple languages into a continuous movement that ultimately loops back upon itself at the end of the book. Water here becomes historical and cyclical, suggesting that language, like the river Liffey, carries the sediments of countless past stories.

Woolf’s opening in The Waves also begins with water, but in a very different register. The novel starts with the rising sun over the sea while waves move rhythmically toward the shore. Throughout the book, brief descriptive passages of the sea and sky alternate with interior monologues spoken by six characters whose lives unfold across the text. In Woolf’s work, water functions less as a carrier of mythic history and more as a marker of time and consciousness. The movement of waves parallels the movement of perception and memory, tracing the slow unfolding of individual lives from childhood to old age.

Reading these two beginnings side by side highlights two distinct modernist experiments. Joyce constructs what might be called a river of language—dense, multilingual, and associative. Words constantly break apart and recombine, and meaning often emerges through sound, pun, or etymological echo rather than through straightforward narrative explanation. Woolf, by contrast, composes something closer to a tide of consciousness. Her language is lyrical but transparent, while the complexity emerges through the shifting arrangement of voices and the gradual layering of temporal experience.

Both writers challenge the authoritative narrative voice that dominated the nineteenth-century novel, yet they do so through different strategies. Joyce multiplies voices until the text resembles a collective dream in which identities blur and historical fragments surface unpredictably. Woolf, on the other hand, carefully orchestrates her six speakers, arranging their monologues almost like movements in a musical composition. Where Joyce floods the page with linguistic abundance, Woolf allows meaning to accumulate through rhythm and repetition.

Reading The Waves alongside the first chapter of Finnegans Wake has helped me approach Joyce with a different posture. Instead of attempting to decode every phrase, I find myself listening for patterns of sound and rhythm, noticing recurring fragments, and allowing passages to drift past with the patience one brings to watching water move. The experience becomes less about solving a puzzle and more about inhabiting a current.

As the first month of a year-long reading journey through Finnegans Wake, this pairing feels like an appropriate beginning. Woolf’s sea and Joyce’s river offer two different visions of movement within modernist writing—two bodies of water that, in their own ways, carry language forward.