/lit/ - Literature

Then you haven't lived enough. It's quite literally filters depending on the individual. The symbolic associations you draw are determined by the kind of life you've lived, and information you've absorbed.

To put it simply: every reader dreams his own dream reading this book, because every reader lives their own life.

>Then you haven't lived enough. It's quite literally filters depending on the individual. The symbolic associations you draw are determined by the kind of life you've lived, and information you've absorbed.

>To put it simply: every reader dreams his own dream reading this book, because every reader lives their own life.

>>20189969
This is the mentally ill reply.

>>20189931
He's just having fun. He's called JOYce for a reason. Don't read much into it and instead enjoy the word plays and silliness. You need to speak at least three European languages to fully enjoy it, though.

Here's a random passage, what's good about it?

It's all a dream lol

>>20189994
It sounds nice

>>20189931
NOOOOOOOOOO!!! WHAT DOES IT MEAN EVERYTHING MUST HAVE A MEANING AND THERE MUST BE NO FUN AND GAMES FOR ANYONE NOOOOOOOO!!!

>>20190017
>muh fun and games
>muh it’s a dream
>muh soulful gibberish with deep hidden meanings
>one of the most celebrated and studied authors in the English language
What a bunch of horseshit. If someone made the case that Joyce was secretly jewish I’d believe it.

>>20189994
What a pile of shit

>>20189994
That's actually better than I expected. Unfortunately, I grew out of my absurdist/nihilist/modernist phase, so it looks childish.

>>20190042
>>one of the most celebrated and studied authors in the English language
Bro, studied by the post-45 liberal academia. Are you so new you take that seriously?

>>20190042
>If someone made the case that Joyce was secretly jewish I’d believe it.
Hmm, this is what many people fail to understand. This "jewish" behavior is not jewish, it's white. Jews simply exploit it *for their benefit* while whites engage in it *for no benefit*. That's the real difference, not the behavioral difference. You'll see white marxists almost indistinguishable from jewish marxists, but if you dig deeper, the difference will reveal itself.

>>20189931
And you never will.

>>20189931
Don't worry, no ones does and everyone who claims otherwise is just pretending.

>>20190254
Bitch there are still entire undergraduate university courses on Ulysses alone in almost every english speaking university. Imagine wasting your time and thousands of dollars studying and writing essays on hmmm my whimsical description of water boiling yess haha he shaved! so clever! ahh haha yes an entire chapter without punctuation: brilliant! Three cheers for Israel!

>>20190310
What's your deal with Israel?

>>20189994
I hope this helps.

>>20190325
literally quoting the book

I've read random passages from it and some of it surprisingly makes sense, albeit in a very abstract, dream-like way. Someday I'll read the whole thing.

>>20190261
You’re sort of right, but if you read Spengler he has this idea of civilization where there’s two groups of people in each culture; those who are in ‘high’ society and directly participate in the zeitgeist and those living outside of history where they have no connection to the metaphysical undercurrent of the civilization, but you still can participate. Currently we are in the middle-late stage of civilization where as you can see since the beginning of ‘liberalization’ we have removed the historical connotation of society more and more, where now we are all living outside of history; the current ‘high’ society being redundant. The Jews have always lived outside of western civilization and they have been resisted by the ‘high’ society until they were able to shift the focus of western civilization to cumulative progress through technique(liberal capitalism).

>>20191359
>where now we are all living outside of history; the current ‘high’ society being redundant.
Not really, the high society is the jewish order at the moment. It's just that the castle of cards is collapsing so everything is in motion.

>>20189931
I can always tell that most of the peoe here shitting on the book haven't read it and probably couldn't even name the main character. Get the skeleton key by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson. It gives an outline of the plot and characters of the book and "translates" a good amount of the text.
The very basic gist is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker comes home to Dublin on a boat from the East, and on the way home he has a sexual/inappropriate encounter with two young women, which three soldiers witness. HCE then has his name stained with this sin through all time, past, present, and future, and is put on public trial by the four judges (cardinal points of the compass, Matthew Mark Luke and John). I could summarize the rest of the book but just read it anons, put down your pride and your arrogance and give it an honest go. You are not smarter than it, it is not gibberish, in fact it's almost the complete antithesis to gibberish in that every word has several specific meanings within the immense, world-large web of meaning the book weaves.

Or could you just read half of the first paragraph and say "lmao it's shit"

>>20191723
pseud

>>20191723
It was sexual relations with his own daughter in the Phoenix park and the three soldiers caught him. Each of the Earwicker family dream about some details of it, including Shem who has a crucial piece of evidence.

>>20189994
The rhythm in this is the same as Pound's reading of Cantos

>>20191723
Then why write than instead of ,making up words and being obtuse? Lynch works because film is better than books at being surreal.

>>20191723
> Or could you just read half of the first paragraph and say "lmao it's shit
It took me 2 days without googling it to realize that incoherent babble in the first paragraph was supposed to be the sound of thunder. Joyce is an insufferable cuckhold

>>20192974
gol-go-go-go-gol-goth-golgolgolgol?
I thought that was the sound of his daughter throating him.

>>20192986
It was his daughter throating Beckett.

>>20189994
To put it as cynically as possible, one of the joys of reading Finnegans Wake is that other difficult, long-winded, at-times dull works legitimately feel like a breath of fresh air to read and easier on the brain after forcing it through some passages of Joyce’s tricky magnum opus.

But cynicism aside, Harold Bloom once infamously wrote on the Wikipedia page for Finnegans Wake (where we all get our knowledge about books from): “If aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon, [Finnegans Wake] would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante". Although passages of it can be turgid and seemingly unappealing, there’s also gems hidden in it of a poetic beauty that would be difficult to recreate in what Joyce disparagingly called at some point “wideawake goahead” language. This is a nightbook, a dreambook, the counterpart to Ulysses (itself infamously dense and challenging but refreshingly easy compared to the Wake) being a daybook. It’s also a text with the resonance of ancient myths and religious scriptures, a book of hieroglyphs, a book that encapsulates Joseph Campbell’s idea of the monomyth before he came up with it — in fact, Campbell took the word “monomyth,” and much of his inspiration as an anthropologist, from this book itself!

For Nabokov, he described this contrast between the bits of beauty hidden in the apparently indecipherable mass of it as the book being, “nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore ... a cancerous growth of phony word-tissue ... redeemed only by some flashes of heavenly intonations”.

>>20189931
That's the point
Embrace the meme

>>20193286
To give some great quotes from an interview with the great philosopher-mystic-comedian-author Robert Anton Wilson on it:

>RAW: Yes, FW is what I call “The Good Book”, and I’m only half joking. To me it’s not only the greatest novel ever written, it’s the greatest poem ever written, the greatest detective story ever written, and the most entertaining work in all literature, and as William York Tindall of Columbia says, it’s the funniest and dirtiest book in the world. People are intimidated by it. If the publishers just had the sense to put on the cover, “the funniest and dirtiest book in the world - Tindall, Columbia”, it would sell a lot better, and people would make the effort to decipher it.

>RAW: Well, to start from Joyce. Joyce was probably the greatest anthropologist who ever lived, and it’s a scandal that he’s not taught in all anthropology classes. And it was through the study of Joyce that Joseph Campbell developed his unique approach to anthropology. The first book he wrote after “The Skeleton Key” was “The Hero of a Thousand Faces”, and that book would be impossible without “The Skeleton Key”; “The Skeleton Key” gave him the monomyth, the archetype behind all the other archetypes that he uses in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” and then develops in his later books like the four-volume “Masks of God”. But Joyce was Campbell’s guide, just as he’s the guide to quantum mechanics in many senses. Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel Prize winner, got his three-quark model out of FW. The three quarks are the three major characters in FW: the two twins who are opposite, and the third who was both twins combined and still a third independent character. To understand thoughts like two twins who are the opposite of a third who combines both twins together, you’ve got to think in a Taoist way. Like the joke: how many Zen masters does it take to change a light bulb? Two: one to change it, and one to not change it. Well that’s the logic of the Sham-Ham-Japheth relationship in FW, which is also the Bacon-Shakespeare-Raleigh relationship and the Tom-Dick-and-Harry and the many other types of trilogies in the human mind, including the Holy Trinity and Dogfather-Dogson-and-Co, which sounds like an English company name, but it’s actually Charlles Dodgson - Lewis Carroll - the two twins who are opposite, Charles Dodgson the logician and Lewis Carroll the fantasist are united in one body: a certain man, who was Dodgson part of the time and Carroll part of the time, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He wrote treatises on the pure mathematical foundations of logic with one part of his mind and he wrote “Alice in Wonderland” with the other part. So Dogfather-Dogson-and-Co is Dodgson divided up into three parts, like the holy trinity - the Father, the Son, and - Coo! - the Holy Pigeon.

>>20193539
>RAW: Let’s see, the major theme of FW is the fall and the rise. On the first page you’ve got the Wall Street stock market crashing and the fall of the Roman empire and Adam and Eve falling because of the forbidden fruit, and Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall, and Tim Finnegan falling off the wall, and the old Irish drinking song from which the book takes its title, and the dream of falling asleep to the collective unconscious of the species, and below that into the non-local consciousness of the entire cosmos, and all this falling is followed by a rising at the end in which the river turns into air molecules. The river turns becomes one with the sea, and the Irish sea, and the Irish sea becomes air molecules which become clouds which float over the Wicklow Hills, and they come down as rain, and you’re back at the beginning of the book where this rain is the river Liffey forming in the hills to flow from Dublin and go out to the sea. So you’ve got this cyclical rise-and-fall. And I find more and more that the symbolism of the thing suggests the fall of DNA to this planet, which is Fred Hoyle’s cosmological theory, that DNA didn’t happen by accident, it was propagated throughout the galaxy by higher intelligences. You’ve got the DNA falling on this planet, and FW has all these metamorphoses, you’ve got the four stages of the insect: the egg, the chrysalis, the larva, the adult, I’ve got them slightly out of order I think; I’m not an entomologist. And then you’ve got the lords of the four quarters: Matt Gregory, Marcus Lyons, Luke Tar-pey, and Johnny MacDougal, which are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, plus the bed that I lie on, an old children’s prayer, but it’s also the four chambers of the human heart, the four kings of the tarot deck, the four provinces of Ireland, but it’s this basic four part cycle there which Joyce calls their weatherings and their marryings and their buryings and their natural selection, which refers to all these insect and mammalian patterns, the parallels that Joyce keeps drawing. He manages to combine the evolution of plants, insects, and mammals into this structure, and it’s all part of - the deepest part of the collective unconscious that Joyce is exploring in FW. And there’s this cycle of the DNA being spread through the galaxy, falling onto the Earth, going through these primitive stages of evolution, and then rising up from the Earth at the end to return to union with the rest of the galaxy. I think Joyce is prophesying the space age that we are now entering.

>>20193286
>>20193539
>>20193560
interesting posts, thank you.

>>20193560
A fascinating lens through which to view Finnegans Wake (and this is actually mentioned in Bob’s “Prometheus Rising”) is as a fractal or a hologram. A hologram has the unique property that if you cut out any given piece of the hologram, it will contain in itself all the information of the entire hologram, simply repeated at this smaller section. Finnegans Wake has this same structure, where sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters, and sections repeat these same motifs and themes in awe-inspiringly consistent, interlocked, but variating fashions (like a jazz piece). Finnegans Wake could be thought of as being as much a dense mosaic, a palimpsest, a kaleidoscope, an abstract expressionist painting, or a fugue in verbal form as it could be regarded as a novel. Its theme is legitimately: “Everything.” Joyce, megalomaniacal genius that he was, legitimately wanted this book to have the theme of: “Everything” — the rise and fall of civilizations, the nature of the human psyche (thereby including both psychology and sociology), life and growth from birth to childhood to adolescence to maturity to old age to death, masculine and feminine polarities, human sexuality, family dynamics, international relations, geopolitics, and history, comparative literature, mythology, theology, and comparative religion, biology, every -ology you can think of. In this sense, it out-Ulysses Ulysses’s encyclopedic grandeur and attempt to capture as much of the human experience as Joyce could in it. Joyce, I think, said that he wanted Ulysses to be so symphonically detailed that future historians could reconstruct all of Dublin from it. Finnegans Wake, even more ambitiously, is like a book one could reconstruct the entire universe and all major fields of human enterprise from.

Viewing it as a work of art very distinct from the traditional novel you’ll read, is a lens it’s possible to take and thereby enjoy it in a very different way from the traditional novel you’ll read. Let me sum up this brief aside on Finnegans Wake that I hope some people enjoyed, with a passage from Terence McKenna, the modern day philosophico-literary entertainer and hallucinogen advocate:

>>20193639
>The theme is always the same: the delivery of the Word, the misinterpreta- tion of the Word, and the redemption of the Word on every level, at all times and places. The reason I’ve now gone some distance toward explaining why I think of it as psychedelic, the reason why I think of it as eschatological and apocalyptic is because — it’s hard to tell how much of this material he took seriously and how much of it was grist for his literary mill — Joyce was perfectly conversant with Renaissance theories of magic. The entire book is based on La Scienza Nuova of Giambattista Vico, who was a Renaissance sociologist and systems theorist, and Joyce once, in a famous interview, said that if the whole universe were to be destroyed and only Finnegans Wake survived, that the goal had been that then the entire universe could be reconstructed out of this. This is a very Talmudic idea, that somehow a book is the primary reality. The idea in some schools of Hasidism is that all of the future is already contained in the Torah. Then when you ask them, “Well, if it’s contained there, then isn’t it predestined?” the answer is no, because the letters are scrambled and only the movement of the present moment through the text correctly unscrambles and arranges the letters. This is Joyce-thinking for sure, and it’s very close to a central theme in Joyce — and a central theme in the Western religious tradition — which is the coming into being of the manifestation of the Word, the declension of the Word into matter.

>>20189994
its easy to deny criticism when you act strangely

>>20193649
>In a sense, what Joyce was trying to do, he was in that great tradition of literary alchemy whose earlier practitioners were people like Robert Fludd, Athanasius Kircher, Paracelsus; these are not familiar names, but in the late flowering of alchemy, when the rosy glow of modern science could already be seen, the alchemists turned toward literary allegory, in the 16th and early 17th century. Joyce is essentially in that tradition. This is an effort to condense the entirety of experience, as Joyce says in the Wake, “Allspace in a Notshall,” is what we’re searching for here, a kind of philosopher’s stone of literary as- sociations from which the entire universe can be made to blossom forth. The way it’s done is through pun and tricks of language, and double and triple and quadruple entendre. No word is opaque, every word is transparent and you see through it to older meanings, stranger associations, and as your mind tries to follow these associative trees of connection you eventually get the feeling, which is the unique feeling that the Wake gives you. It’s about as close to LSD on the page as you can get, because you are simultaneously many points of view, many dramatis loci, many places in the plot, and the whole thing is riddled with resonance; a man doing a task on one level is on another level a Greek god completing a task, and on another level some other figure of some more obscure mythology, so Finnegans Wake is like a dipstick for your own intelligence. What you bring to it is going to determine what you get out, and if you have read the books which Joyce was familiar with, or if you have armed yourself with such simple things as a Fodor’s guide to Ireland, or a good map of Ireland or a good work of Irish mythology, then it immediately begins to betray its secrets to you. It’s so rich that it’s easy to make original discoveries, it’s easy to see and understand things which probably have not been seen or understood since James Joyce put it there, because he had this kind of all-inclusive intelligence.

Source for McKenna on the Wake: https://transcendentalobject.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/finneganswake.pdf
Source for RAW on the Wake: http://maybelogic.blogspot.com/2009/04/robert-anton-wilson-on-finnegans-wake.html?m=1

>>20193587
You’re welcome. Finnegans Wake often gets a shitty rep here, I think, because it’s either like some vague responses like, “Read it as if it’s a dream and just enjoy the language and you’ll enjoy it” (valid advice on its own level, but c’mon, how many times can we repeat that cliche?) or “It’s an example of ‘The emperor has no clothing’ and Joyce being a massive pseud creating an impossible book to read for academics to jerk off over” (which is also a valid critique in its own way, honestly, but overlooks that reading and studying and deciphering and pondering the book can actually be FUN!)

>>20190341
Where did you get Schmidt's annotations

>>20193286
>where we all get our knowledge about books from
Speak for yourself you fucking faggot.

>>20189994
i don't know what any of that meant but it was really funny.
is this book just a compilation of schizoposting?

>>20189982
Would English, Czech and Esperonto do?

>>20193688
I bought the faksimile edition.

>>20198295
Czech not so much but Esperanto yes.