/lit/ - Literature

It's influenced me as a writer more than anything else I've ever read. Finnegans Wake is a love letter to the death of sense and is arguably the first true postmodern novel. I see it as a work of transcendental metafiction, and of the mind's constant, inescapable battle with the boundaries of language. It's likely the most honest novel ever written and is Joyce's take on an autobiography, only he skips the unimportant shit like, you know, "things that happened," and instead tries to give us a window into not only his mind but into the way our minds work on a level we're generally not aware of. If God has any one language he favors, Joyce has come the closest to speaking it in Finnegans Wake.

>>16917045
Amazing level of shitposting. Bravo.

fart fetishists

You need to read the right translation

>>16917102
Isn't it mostly English though?

>>16917102
retarded comment

>>16917016
Pseuds

>>16917201
>If you like FW, you're no true Scotsman!

>>16917102
what

>>16917047
>>16917201
Don’t you have some more YA books to read?

I bought a reading guide to go along with it because I'm not pretentious enough to pretend I know what any of it is about. Joseph Campbell wrote a really good exegesis called, "A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake"

I pick it up about once a month and flip through some random pages, marvel at the language and the resulting interpretation in the reading guide, and then put it back on the shelf. I couldn't ever imagine reading it cover to cover, for me the writing is more interesting than the story (if there even is a proper one?)

That being said, I love it for what it is. For a while I considered it my favorite book. There's something humbling about this book. Like half the time I don't know what the fuck I'm reading, but I'm still grinning ear-to-ear because the wordplay is so damned interesting.

>>16917964
>I bought a reading guide to go along with it because I'm not pretentious enough to pretend I know what any of it is about
So you bought a book written by someone who is pretentious enough to pretend to know what it's about? How does that make any sense? Joyce would have laughed if he were alive to see the ways people try to wring """"meaning"""" from his writing.

>>16918065
How the fuck would there be no meaning to any of it? Even if you personally were to spray shit on the wall and write in poopy hieroglyphics there could be a meaning extracted from it.

>>16918065
>So you bought a book written by someone who is pretentious enough to pretend to know what it's about?
I know you're trolling, but Joseph Campbell is arguably the most influential literary scholar of the modern western world. If there was anyone's opinion I'd listen to, it'd be his - especially over some random faggot's opinion on 4chan.

>>16918097
Do you think Finnegans Wake was written as a cipher? Was it written to have little nuggets of meaning hidden between the lines? Did Joyce intend for it to be interacted with on the same level on which you'd interact with a shopping list? To delve into the text with the goal of extracting meaning with an analytical mind is to misunderstand, because FW is not about a bunch of little concepts hidden throughout the text, it's about the one biggest concept we humans are able to hold in our heads: the concept of things which are too large to conceptualize.

>>16917964

It's about a guy climbing a ladder to get some alcohol and then he falls down, hits his head, dies, and then people pour alcholol all over him and he comes back to life.

Not joking

Incredibly based desu

>>16917016
robert anton wilson

>>16917045
>>16917102
based shitposting, I wish every thread was this good

>>16918124
Yeah I'm aware of that surface level stuff, but there's a TON of other shit going on in the story. Based on the Campbell interpretation, the story is pretty expansive and is composed of multiple layers of subtext ranging from biblical allegories to modernist love stories. It's really hard to point at it all and try to succinctly define as one thing.

>>16918225
Does Campbell's Skeleton Key break it down on a chapter-by-chapter basis? So you read a chapter then his interpretation of that chapter? Or is it more of a broad over-arching interpretation? Might check it out

>>16918253
Try John Bishop's Book of the Dark instead

>>16918253
It contains a general synopsis at the beginning and a general interpretation, and then the rest of it is a chapter by chapter exegesis that goes through pairings of paragraphs and lines at a time. Very thorough, but not overwhelming. You'll need an actual copy of Finnegans Wake to follow along.

>>16918275
This is a good one as well, but I think I personally prefer a skeleton key

>>16918408
>a chapter by chapter exegesis that goes through pairings of paragraphs and lines at a time
Joyce rolls in his grave

THE END ALL BE ALL TO PUNNS AND REEDLES

>>16917016
People who love literature. Intellectuals. Adults.

>>16917045
It's gibberish

>>16917016
>getting filtered by Finnegan’s wake

>>16918887
Yes

>>16917016
What ever happened to that one schizo who thought the irish government was astroturfing the board so that they could garner support to move joyce's remains to dublin

>>16919937
Please let it be true

>>16920115
He also thought the government ordered a discord of 13 agents to question, mislead, and mock him and also to post about finnegan's wake as much as possible
This all happened at the start of corona but I haven't been keeping up with this board for a while so i don't know how it ended

>>16920145
He also thought they were planning to use joyce's bone marrow to wake fionn mac cumhail or something
He posted a picture of himself but I didn't save it

>>16917102
lmao

/lit/ hates this? In the same breath though I remember you guys praised Ulysses which is a book by the same author

The Trout Mask Replica of /lit/

You all probably got filtered by the geometry lesson. I can't imagine reading Joyce in any other language besides English, just sounds wrong.

>>16917016
Joanna Newsom quotes a line from it in one of her songs so I guess it's ok but I will never read it.

/lit/ FEARS late joyce

>>16920311
Like TMR it’s the most effective pleb-filter

Finnegans Wake is nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most aggravating to the insomniac I am.

>>16920311
I was just gonna say this

>>16920743
Filtered.

>>16917016
http://www.rawillumination.net/2016/01/the-structure-of-finnegans-wake-fractal.html

http://maybelogic.blogspot.com/2009/04/robert-anton-wilson-on-finnegans-wake.html

Robert Anton Wilson might have been a fed but I like him on Joyce

>>16920819
That's Nabokov

>>16920927
a fed? how so?

>>16921073
Yes, we know. Nabokov got filtered. Man says he wants aesthetics and then throws a fit when he gets aesthetics