3. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
Has anybody read it? If so, would anybody like to step forward and offer a screenplay? In fairness, Joyces experimental, unknowable comic prose would probably not arouse too many objections if it ever were turned into a film. It is after all the most unreadable, unfilmable novel in the list. Each sentence is open to a variety of interpretations and closed to most readers patience and comprehension. Non-linear, explosive and nebulous, Joyces words fire out like electrons defending the nucleus of the novels inner meaning. Finnegans Wake might work as a kind of slice-of-life affair, in the same way Ulysses could be centred around a single day in Dublin, but would viewers be appreciative enough of this kind of ruptured storytelling? A deep appreciation of both the novel and of Joyce himself is probably going to be the prime motivation for anybody tackling an adaptation of Finnegans Wake. Still, Joyce is literature. Literature is Joyce. Even the apostrophe from Finnegans is omitted so he can bamboozle us from the very first words. Joyce himself loved the movies, opening up the very first cinema in Dublin with the help of his Trieste backers. And there is some history between the three mediums of film, books and Joyce. John Huston adapted The Dead, the final book in the Dubliners series. Joseph Strick also dared the impossible with a faithful film version of Ulysses in 1967, which showed just how unfilmable Joyce is.