/lit/ - Literature

Just run with it, it was meant to be a silly pile of derp to the 9001st degree.

>wat

2DEEP4U

>>1866670

wat doesn't imply distaste. wat implies perplexity

>>1866688

And your point being?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU78NdeKFtA

There's an even better lecture on the subject by Robert Anton Wilson if you can find it too

>>1866862
http://maybelogic.blogspot.com/2009/04/robert-anton-wilson-on-finnegans-wake.html


Incredible talk.

Don't get me started on Finnegans Wake. My least favorite Joyce work, and of course it's one of the questions in my final exams.
I basically talked only about Joyces' life at the time he was writing that, and then gently led the conversation to Ulysses.

Altough I would be interested, if there is actually anyone on here, who understood it the first time he read it. Anyone?
I didn't, that's for sure.

>>1866869
tl;dr: I'm stupid.

>>1866869
>implying it is a book you read like a regular novel and then put down..

finnegans wake is something you read for your whole life, and get one of the several different layers depending on where you are at in your life.

>>1866869

when you understand what he was he was doing it's a lot easier to then read it and approximate something like an 'understanding' of it's 'meaning' if that's really all you care about

>>1866888
Funny enough that comes pretty close to what I said to the guy taking the exam, in an effort to change the subject. ^^

But on the serious side, I have never mentioned what you implied. I read it quite a few times actually. I just don't like it that much, really. And working out a scheme to learn from was just horrible. Maybe I am a bit biased on the whole thing.

>>1866882
Did I ever stated the contrary?

>>1866869
It just reads like occasionaly evocative gibberish. If it has any meaning, it's completely personal to him. And it's not that just don't get it either. I got almost a perfect 100 on the IQ test we had in school.

>>1866869
The key to understanding Finnegans Wake is taking the parallax concept which is at the heart of Ulysses and the idea that all the little details can mean something in any way to tons of characters in different ways, thereby highlighting the complexities of life and experience, even in just one day. With FW Joyce was trying to do the same thing, but with his readers and audience. People will find among the wank little things which stand out to them and relate somehow because of the sheer vast scope of obscure references and puns in the book. That's what I "understand" of it anyway- a novel which is trying to be universally personal to everyone.

I read a book on Joyce once where a hypothetical situation was imagined of a bunch of fairly educated people, men and women, all from different backgrounds, who read a paragraph's worth of Finnegans Wake and after an hour or so had multiple detailed ideas of what was going on, because of their individual readings of the little idiosyncrasies and jokes. The level of meaning is literally incomprehensible, beyond analysis, which was JAJ's intent.

>>1866888
Oh sorry, I just figured you are referring to my last sentence. Well, I see that there are things about these kinds of books, that you only start to realise after a few read-throughs, but when I read it the first time, I was just baffled and found it hard, to actually understand the SENTENCES. And my English really is not that bad.

>>1866862
god, i'm interested, but could he talk any slower?

>>1866914
>incomprehensible, beyond analysis
which is modernist, because of course it reflects how we can never really see into the myriad, highly complicated aspects of another person. The book means something to everyone, but you are never going to truly get another person's analysis of it just as you are never going to truly get what they are all about. Summed up rather well in Joyce's quote "is there one who understands me?" which could be taken as a reading of his work and its intention, or as a more bleak existential statement- can we ever really understand and "know" each other?

>>1866914
That's actually quite helpful and nicely put. Thank you.

I think I might give it another shot, keeping this in mind.

Could it be, the Joyce Book you're referring to is one by Burgess? Seems familiar somehow. Thanks for your answer, btw.

>>1866927
Glad to be of assistance :) it was actually the Cambridge Companion to James Joyce which contained a few interesting essays, including that one on FW.

>>1866934


>Cambridge Companion to James Joyce
Ha, I don't own that one. Know what's on the shopping list then.

Thx.

>>1866943
I wasn't hugely enthralled by it to be honest, that part about the Wake is what stands out from the many essays on facets of his writing and career. Get it out from a library maybe but it's not worth buying.

For a book like Finnegan's Wake this, you really have to use immanent criticism above all to even begin discussing it.

>>1866970
hmm, okay. On another note, have you read

>James Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essay

by Hart and Hayman?
It's supposed to be decent, so I'm thinking to expand my Joyce library with it.

>>1866996
No, I'll have to find that one. Best book I've read on Ulysses is "James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses" by Frank Budgen, his account of his close friendship with Joyce when he lived in Zurich and was writing a large portion of the novel. Hell of a lot of insight, most of it coming from JAJ himself. Also paints quite a vivid picture of what he was like as a person. I couldn't recommend it more.

>>1867008
Yeah, I enjoyed that to. Ellmann, of course, is also worth a read, although his style is pretty slow at times.

>>1867012
Ellmann is the go-to for biographical stuff but for some reason after trudging through his enormous book I didn't feel like I had gained much knowledge about Joyce's persona because Ellmann had presented it so erratically- at times very eccentric, at others grounded, at times apathetic and at others driven, at times weak and at others fierce and strong; it was all very difficult to pin down. Maybe I got more from Budgen's book because it depicts Joyce at one particular time in life.

>reading Finnegans Wake for a "meaning."

I seriously hope you don't do this.

Do this instead:

Step 1) Read and understand the major works of Western Literature (you don't need to read the entire works in their original languages, but I would at least get the etymologies of some key terms like Thalatta, Hoi Polloi, Kleos, etc.).
2) Read and understand all of Joyce's works (including The Exiles and his non-fiction essays).
3) Learn about Joyce's personal life and understand how it comes through in mediated ways in his works.
4) Read Finnegans Wake a couple of pages a day forever.
5) Make sure you laugh sincerely at something once a page, or else you're doin' it wrong

>>1867027
>read and understand all of Joyce's works
You can't truly "understand" anything, especially not works by Joyce; that was, a lot of the time, his entire point. You can only get an idea of what he was trying to accomplish and show, and find examples of how he did that.

>>1867035
Knowing that means you understand his works.

I didn't say, "Completely master and exhaustively comprehend" his works.

every time i hear somebody talking about finnegans wake it sounds like the greatest book of all time but then when i start reading it i'm like whaaaat and stop

I've not read it, but why is there no apostrophe in Finnegans? I had gathered there was a funeral involved, yet the title would indicate a family of people named Finnegan awakening from sleep. Is it this latter?

Or was Joyce too fucking lazy to add an apostrophe?

>>1867559
probably because he was irish or smth and didn't even know english properly

>>1867559
its some kind of pun joyce made where everyone on earth is waking up (we are all finnegan i guess)

>>1867559
>>1867559
>>1867559

/lit/: the only place on earth pretends to comprehend this book but can't understand its title.

>>1867559
Yeah. It's the pun on funeral wake, and all the people of the world, who are represented and reflected in the multiple complex dream-thoughts of the Finnegan, waking up from sleep.

Borges thought Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were "failed masterpieces." He claims that Joyce tries to fit in so much about every character but in the end we don't really know these characters, we're just impressed with Joyce's technique. Harold Bloom, on the other hand, argues that Joyce was trying to complete the canon with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake instead of providing some kind of wisdom or what have you. Virginia Woolf makes a similar claim to both, that Ulysses is great but suffers from essentially trying to hard.

There seems to be two camps of Joyce. Those that feel he's basically the greatest since Shakespeare, and those that think that his greatness is itself a flaw.

>>1867728
>we never really know the characters in the end
That's the point, as far as I see it. Mind you, I would say that; I'm in the former Joyce camp.

>>1867728
Your arse was full of farts, that night, my darling.

>>1867743
Yeah, yeah, all the coolest people are fucked up.

>>1867728
I suppose we'll know in a few hundred years. Joyce was either absurdly ahead of his time or insane

I wish there were more people in here who thought of the book like me. Gotta say, to them folks suggesting a read through all his previous works, to those suggesting a read of his biographers' commentaries, and those who say anything but the encouragement to read the book in question that's quite irrelevant. I'm currently 160-something pages in. You needn't have a laugh on every page, it's not haha funny, it's the appreciating nod of an intellectual to see his humour. It's more about his experimentation with literary devices, named and yet unnamed.

I do agree with those who encourage studying though, and I'll coalesce here: read Finnegans Wake if it is relevant to your own projects/outlook. I may be in the wrong to the lot of you, but I stopped reading books for pleasure after Ulysses. Not that Ulysses was displeasing, though it seems to have been for some of you, but if I'm to ever accept the hypothetical treatise I have made of Joyce on Writing by reading his works, I have to say that it seems as though nearly everything he read he incorporated into his works. Even obscure plays and poems that I've never heard of, such as reference to Gee Gee in Ulysses, or in Finnegans Wake when he writes In love, as war, (a line from Henry Brooke's poetry.)

My advice is that if you're reading Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, you're reading the product of an untold Discipline of the Writer. Writer, not referring to Joyce, but to every writer out there. Out of all that I've learned about his biography has been left irrelevant when reading into his works for their literary value.

I want to know if anybody else is reading Finnegans Wake this summer. If you are, email me.

>>1868671
Pynchon is the new Joyce, except with more pot.

MORE LIKE FINNEGAN'S PIECE OF CAKE

>>1867744
mfw this is cool people disorder

>The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture. There was a time when naif alphabetters would have written it down the tracing of a purely deliquescent recidivist, possibly ambidextrous, snubnosed probably and presenting a strangely profound rainbowl in his (or her) occiput. To the hardily curiosing entomophilust then it has shown a very sexmosaic of nymphosis in which the eternal chimerahunter Oriolopos, now frond of sugars, then lief of saults, the sensory crowd in his belly coupled with an eye for the goods trooth bewilderblissed by their night effluvia with guns like drums and fondlers like forceps persequestellates his vanessas from flore to flore.

>Somehows this sounds like the purest kidooleyoon wherein our madernacerution of lour lore is rich. All's so herou from us him in a kitchernott darkness, by hasard and worn rolls arered, we must grope on till Zerogh hour like pou owl giaours as we are would we salve aught of moments for our aysore today. Amousin though not but. Closer inspection of the bordereau would reveal a multiplicity of personalities inflicted on the documents or document and some prevision of virtual crime or crimes might be made by anyone unwary enough before any suitable occasion for it or them had so far managed to happen along.

>In fact, under the closed eyes of the inspectors the traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their contrarieties eliminated, in one stable somebody similarly as by the providential warring of heartshaker with housebreaker and of dramdrinker against freethinker our social something bowls along bumpily, experiencing a jolting series of prearranged disappointments, down the long lane of (it's as semper as oxhousehumper! generations, more generations and still more generations.

>>1868721

>>1868721

Is that an excerpt from the book?
If so holy shit, that is unreadable.

the eternal chimerahunter Oriolopos [...] persequestellates his vanessas from flore to flore.

"The best way to approach Finnegans Wake is in a group. It has to be stalked, like a wild animal." Robert Anton Wilson

also, read it aloud...after a few pints of Guinness

>ITT: retards that don't know how to make the book fun to read.

Read it with a thesaurus or google in hand, and realize that every line in the book uses insane amounts of wordplay and you are all to stupid to get half of it because it is using obscure slang/irish gibberish/wordplay to make it really complex.

mfw if you read it with the proper tools to look up every other word it becomes intelligable and you are all FAGGOTS.

>>1868771
>to stupid
>to
>stupid

>>1868771
ooooooh guys all we have to do is realize that every line in the book uses insane amounts of wordplay thanks bro

"Well you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you every telling has a tailing and that's the he and the she of it."

love that

>>1868771
>implying someone who still uses "faggot" as an insult is intelligent.
I know this is 4chan, but none of the worthwhile posts or criticisms I've ever encountered used such a weak insult
Also
>implying that's an enjoyable way to read a book